Robert Creighton writes: As happens in most places when Street View goes live, I predict the local media will run around the streets trying to find locals who are outraged at the "invasion of privacy" introduced by this technology. I will be watching Tom Murphy on CBC News as they try to stir up yet another "controversy." Worth noting that the cameras used in UK seem to be much higher resolution than used here. No idea what Tom will do, but in recent weeks, CBC has been conspicuously indulging the hoary tradition whereby old media condemn the moral decay promoted by attractive new-media...

08 October, 2009

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, whose interview on Spark was the subject of a somewhat testy post on Contrarian yesterday, has returned fire. I saw your blog entry on my interview with CBC and my book "Delete". From your entry it is obvious that you have not read the book. [True.] That's perfectly fine - except that you then move to render a flawed judgment on the book. To start with, the example that I used in the interview is not about photographic memory, but about a biological condition of a very small number of people who cannot forget - or at least remember a...

23 September, 2009

The excellent CBC Radio show, blog, and podcast known as Spark has just posted host Nora Young's  long interview with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schönberger believes cheap digital storage has encouraged us, often unwittingly, to store more information than is good for us. In the interview, he offers two examples: Some people with photographic memory have trouble making decisions, because memories of bad outcomes from previous decisions paralyze them. A Canadian psychotherapist, Andrew Feldmar, was permanently barred from entering the United States because a US border guard, using Google, discovered a 10-year-old article he...

22 September, 2009