Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [29]
But what about the really, truly bad memories? Not the harmless embarrassments that still make you blush, but the ones that are so compromising or potentially harmful—to your reputation, to your loved ones, or to your own sanity—that you just can’t abide the thought of keeping them?
What about a woman who’s been abused by her husband? When she finally escapes him and gets help putting a new life together, what could be more unwelcome than digital records of the horror that had been her life? The last thing she wants to do is relive the insults, the threats, the cat-and-mouse mind games, the screams, the beatings, and the bruises. It would only be natural for her to want to delete every last bit of it.
What about a young man who makes some bad decisions in high school? He makes the wrong friends, starts experimenting with drugs, and ends up in a stoned stupor in the backseat of a stolen car. He is arrested, and the experience with the juvenile justice system scares him straight. The state expunges his juvenile record and he goes on to become a law-abiding citizen with a family and a profession. In a world with no records, he could easily leave the past behind. In a world where most things are recorded and saved, would he have the same chance?
Nevertheless, I still advocate keeping everything, even the worst of it. They are your e-memories; you control the keys to them. Rather than erase them, you can seal them up. You can put a lock on those events you’d like to forget and never open them up again. What you really want to prevent in these cases is unwanted recall, not retention.
Imagine the abused woman has audio and video recordings of the abuse she endured. She has escaped, gotten treatment, and is living in a new city without fear. Her recordings can easily be locked so that they’ll never come up in regular interactions with her e-memory. But she may want keep them for legal proceedings. Or she may want to share them with future therapists.
Imagine the young man who was arrested, now grown older and involved in a community effort to block a new commercial development. His opponents start to circulate stories that he was a hard-core criminal in his youth, with gang connections lasting to this day. He finds it in his interest to show his youth record to defend himself against this slander.
Our impulse to hit the delete key may not be the right move to lock away the past. Daniel Schacter advises that “confronting, disclosing, and integrating those experiences we would most like to forget is the most effective counter to [unwanted recall].”
LOST BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
I have personal experience with unwanted recall using MyLifeBits. On Sunday January 28, 2007, my manager and dear friend Jim Gray took his forty-foot yacht, Tenacious, on a solo sailing trip out to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco. He went to scatter his mother’s ashes in the wild seascape around the rugged islands.
But Jim never returned. Despite clear weather and no signs of distress from his well-equipped yacht, Jim mysteriously vanished. A massive three-week search did not produce a single clue as to what had happened. As The New York Times reported, “A veritable Who’s Who of computer scientists from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NASA, and universities across the country spent sleepless nights writing ad hoc software, creating a blog, and reconfiguring satellite images so that dozens of volunteers could pore over them, searching for a speck of red hull and white deck among a sea of gray pixels.”
For several months after Jim’s disappearance, I