The Pebble and the Avalanche

Tue, 2007-May-08, 13:56

After about a million or so articles that raise fear, uncertainty, and doubt over blogs and MySpace — based on anecdotes about people who lost their chances of finding a job after prospective employers found something they didn't like on MySpace — comes the million-and-one article: this time with the imprimatur of a Harvard professor.

Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger believes that the Internet changes how we think of people. Instead of gathering assessments from current acquaintances, we look at data on the Internet, some of it quite old, and make judgments from there. He believes that's wrong.

Now, in some very real sense I agree with him: Don't trust data over thirty, to coin a phrase. I'm glad that every foolish comment I uttered in high school, or for that matter in first grade, hasn't been preserved forever on the Internet. And by all means let's disaggregate information by time: a person's current thoughts and actions are almost always far more relevant than items from two decades ago. I think that as social networking sites have a greater impact on society, we will see sites that find a way to wade through the drivel left over from kindergarten and present timely current information about individuals.

But Prof. Mayer-Schoenberger comes from Harvard, and as such he's of the opinion that the free market can't possibly present a solution to the problem of credible assessments of reputation. According to the article above as well as this one, he demands laws to force computers to forget data. This idea is so patently absurd, betrays such complete ignorance with how software and computers work, and would create such an incredible logistical nightmare, that I did what anyone else would do: I searched for the Professor's work online. Unfortunately, I can't find anything to confirm that the quotes and views attributed to him in the press are actually accurate because he doesn't seem to have placed his articles online — to prevent future embarrassment, perhaps?