Event

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger: Deleted, but not Forgotten

Thanks to your Facebook "friends," those incriminating photos of your sloppy night in Cancun will circulate forever. And thanks to e-mail, that bitter diatribe you accidentally copied to your boss will linger in a holding folder until your next evaluation. Can't we just put the past behind us and move on? Not these days, we can't, and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, director of the Information and Innovation Policy Research Centre at the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, thinks we could be losing a quintessentially human right as digital technology and global networks override our natural ability to forget. Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, sees danger in everlasting memory, and holes in information-privacy rights and other superficial fixes, as we try to figure out who owns what, and who can make what go away. Presented by the Town Hall Center for Civic Life.