How - Dov Seidman [22]
THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
When Paul Chung hit the send button on an e-mail message to his friends, he sent a promising career in investment banking into a tail-spin. The Carlyle Group had recently hired the 24-year-old Princeton graduate and relocated him to their Seoul, Korea office. Three days later, he used the company’s network to boast to his buddies in New York about his lavish new lifestyle. “I know I was a stud in NYC,” he wrote, “but I pretty much get about, on average, 5-8 phone numbers a night and at least 3 hot chicks that say they want to go home with me every night I go out.” Later, he bragged about using one bedroom in the apartment his employer provided as his “harem” and another for sexual activities. Astounded recipients forwarded the message to thousands of people on Wall Street, until it finally ended up in his boss’s in-box. Chung lost his job—and his reputation along with it.18 That was in 2001. Five years later, people are still talking about it. I googled “Paul Chung Carlyle,” as his future employers and colleagues undoubtedly will, and found the story cited five times on the first page returned. It will follow him the rest of his life.
The brain forms and stores memories by building networks of neurons. Each network imprints and stores the millions of detailed impressions that make up a memory. The World Wide Web works exactly the same way. Its vast, interconnected database has a persistence of memory that will long outlive us. Even web sites that are pulled down or deleted live on forever on a site called Wayback Machine, which archives 55 billion web pages dating back to 1996.19 The persistence of memory in electronic form makes second chances harder to come by. Before the information revolution, a quack doctor could move to another town and hang out his shingle without fear of repercussion. Now, states keep instantly accessible databases detailing every charge and investigation lodged against him. The same holds true for companies, stores, and eBay sellers. In the information age, life has no chapters or closets; you can leave nothing behind and you have nowhere to hide your skeletons. Your past is your present, and it catches up with you like a truck backing over what it left behind.
It’s not just smoking-gun e-mails like Chung’s that get people into trouble in the information age. With the democratization of information, anyone can publish whatever they think at whatever time he or she thinks it, true or false. The standard of information verification has been lowered. In the mass media age of the 1980s and 1990s, large media companies still acted as the gatekeepers and watchdogs of public information. A professional class of journalists and editors vetted most claims and accusations for veracity before broadcasting them, applying a standard of independent proof and corroboration, or they paid the price for neglecting to do so. Information technology takes this responsibility out of the hands of trained professionals and places it in the hands of anyone with a keyboard. Any disgruntled employee can strike back. A dishonorable accuser with a false accusation can gain instant currency. As was prophetically said in a time before electronic communications (attributed to Mark Twain by some), “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”20 Now, it can circle the earth numerous times in the time truth takes to simply think, “shoe.” Reputations formerly carved in stone now seem easily