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Whether you crave attention or oblivion, be wary of impressions left in online world
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RECENTLY I got a letter from a reader who had two articles published in our paper while she was still a middle-school student.
Now, older and wiser, she regrets her youthful writings, and requested that these articles be removed from our website as well as the portals that have catalogued and archived the pages.
By way of explanation, she wrote: “Since these two articles are some of the first results to show up when searching my name on the Internet, they’ve been slightly conflicting with my professional profile.”
I am sympathetic, but to be honest I do not know how much I can help.
To forget and be forgotten is no longer as easy as in the past.
Centuries ago, you could rid the work you found unsatisfactory by destroying the original manuscripts. In the age of mass printing, things became a bit more difficult, but were still manageable.
Forgetfulness allows us to make a fresh start, to reform, to turn a new leaf.
The combined forces of digitalization, cheap storage, instantaneous retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software conspire to override our natural capacity to forget. Forgetting is now a lost art, and a luxury.
After information has been etched into a hard disk, it achieves a kind of immortality; and is always lurking somewhere ready to pounce, to confront, to contradict, or to embarrass.
There are still those who take comfort in cyber anonymity, little aware of the damning electronic footprints they are leaving everywhere.
One of my colleagues said recently that, with a certain kind of software, an IT professional easily restored all the files he once believed to have been permanently deleted from his laptop.
Unable to forget, we are compelled to live with things that would best be forgotten — embarrassing moments, past indiscretions or painful transgressions.
We also learn, to our dismay, that when we outsource the drudgery of remembering to our hard drives we also waive access to the healing power of forgetting.
We are wary of persons who never forget, and frequently accuse them of being unforgiving. But increasingly we find ourselves in a world that never forgets.
It would be insincere though to say that deletion is totally impossible. As a matter of fact, attention and forgetfulness have both evolved into lucrative business services.
Expensive search results
Take Baidu, the Chinese search engine now embroiled in a scandal over the recent death of a 21-year-old college student. According to reports, this man is said to have pursued an expensive but ineffective cancer treatment allegedly touted on Baidu as a state-of-the-art breakthrough. Regardless of Baidu’s role in this tragic affair (see “Baidu ‘relied too much on profit’,” Shanghai Daily, May 10), China’s leading search engine has certainly mastered the art of monetizing what unsuspecting users see in their search results.
Patients seeking quality treatment might enter keywords such as “best hospital, lung cancer,” only to be subtly but resolutely steered toward hospitals which are good at only one thing: paying for spots in search results.
In this keyword-advertising model, Baidu often sells search placements to the highest bidders. Different words have different values, with such keywords as “cancer” and “epilepsy” being more costly than others.
Baidu’s keyword-advertising services have reportedly fueled the explosive growth of thousands of private hospitals operated by now notorious entrepreneurs from Putian, Fujian Province.
According to one report last year, of the roughly 260 billion yuan (US$41 billion) worth of revenues reaped by Putian hospitals, 60 to 80 percent of this total amount was ultimately paid to Baidu.
It takes little imagination to see deletion-services as the flip side of the keyword advertising coin.
After all, if you can pay to get your name at the top of certain searches, it makes sense that you could also pay to make your name disappear.
In fact, Baidu has reportedly been very busy recently deleting some of its keywords and links. In a recent search on the company’s medical information platform, the shady hospitals in Putian were conspicuously absent.
But for those people who lack the resources to have things professionally scrubbed from the Internet, the best advice may be to avoid leaving any traces there in the first place.
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