FORGIVENESS

In addition to exposing less for the Web to forget, it might be helpful for
us to explore new ways of living in a world that is slow to forgive. It's
sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a "global
village," to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the
villages described in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip
or tale-bearing about other people -- oral or written, true or false,
friendly or mean -- was considered a terrible sin because small communities
have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to
ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor
literal.) But the Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and
forgiving than our brutal global village, where much of the content on the
Internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip: although the Talmudic
sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the book of
life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for
their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud,
people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on
the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their
mistakes. "If a man was a repentant [sinner]," the Talmud says,
"one must
not say to him, 'Remember your former deeds.' "

Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and
the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their
all-powerful divine predecessor. In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS,
Eric Schmidt, the C.E.O. of Google, said that "the next generation is
infinitely more social online" -- and less private -- "as
evidenced by their
Facebook pictures," which "will be around when they're running
for president
years from now." Schmidt added: "As long as the answer is that I chose to
make a mess of myself with this picture, then it's fine. The issue is when
somebody else does it." If people chose to expose themselves for 15 minutes
of fame, Schmidt says, "that's their choice, and they have to live
with it."

Schmidt added that the "notion of control is fundamental to the evolution of
these privacy-based solutions," pointing to Google Latitude, which allows
people to broadcast their locations in real time.

This idea of privacy as a form of control is echoed by many privacy
scholars, but it seems too harsh to say that if people like Stacy Snyder
don't use their privacy settings responsibly, they have to live forever with
the consequences. Privacy protects us from being unfairly judged out of
context on the basis of snippets of private information that have been
exposed against our will; but we can be just as unfairly judged out of
context on the basis of snippets of public information that we have unwisely
chosen to reveal to the wrong audience.

Moreover, the narrow focus on privacy as a form of control misses what
really worries people on the Internet today. What people seem to want is not
simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over their
online reputations. But the idea that any of us can control our reputations
is, of course, an unrealistic fantasy. The truth is we can't possibly
control what others say or know or think about us in a world of Facebook and
Google, nor can we realistically demand that others give us the deference
and respect to which we think we're entitled. On the Internet, it turns out,
we're not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others
don't have the empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention
spans necessary to judge us in context, there's nothing we can do about it.

But if we can't control what others think or say or view about us, we can
control our own reaction to photos, videos, blogs and Twitter posts that we
feel unfairly represent us. A recent study suggests that people on Facebook
and other social-networking sites express their real personalities, despite
the widely held assumption that people try online to express an enhanced or
idealized impression of themselves. Samuel Gosling, the University of Texas,
Austin, psychology professor who conducted the study, told the Facebook
blog, "We found that judgments of people based on nothing but their Facebook
profiles correlate pretty strongly with our measure of what that person is
really like, and that measure consists of both how the profile owner sees
him or herself and how that profile owner's friends see the profile owner."

By comparing the online profiles of college-aged people in the United States
and Germany with their actual personalities and their idealized
personalities, or how they wanted to see themselves, Gosling found that the
online profiles conveyed "rather accurate images of the profile owners,
either because people aren't trying to look good or because they are trying
and failing to pull it off." (Personality impressions based on the online
profiles were most accurate for extroverted people and least accurate for
neurotic people, who cling tenaciously to an idealized self-image.)

Gosling is optimistic about the implications of his study for the
possibility of digital forgiveness. He acknowledged that social technologies
are forcing us to merge identities that used to be separate -- we can no
longer have segmented selves like "a home or family self, a friend self, a
leisure self, a work self." But although he told Facebook, "I
have to find a
way to reconcile my professor self with my having-a-few-drinks self," he
also suggested that as all of us have to merge our public and private
identities, photos showing us having a few drinks on Facebook will no longer
seem so scandalous. "You see your accountant going out on weekends and
attending clown conventions, that no longer makes you think that he's not a
good accountant. We're coming to terms and reconciling with that merging of
identities."

Perhaps society will become more forgiving of drunken Facebook pictures in
the way Gosling says he expects it might. And some may welcome the end of
the segmented self, on the grounds that it will discourage bad behavior and
hypocrisy: it's harder to have clandestine affairs when you're broadcasting
your every move on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. But a humane society
values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of
their personalities in different contexts; and at the moment, the enforced
merging of identities that used to be separate is leaving many casualties in
its wake. Stacy Snyder couldn't reconcile her "aspiring-teacher self" with
her "having-a-few-drinks self": even the impression, correct or not, that
she had a drink in a pirate hat at an off-campus party was enough to derail
her teaching career.

That doesn't mean, however, that it had to derail her life. After taking
down her MySpace profile, Snyder is understandably trying to maintain her
privacy: her lawyer told me in a recent interview that she is now working in
human resources; she did not respond to a request for comment. But her
success as a human being who can change and evolve, learning from her
mistakes and growing in wisdom, has nothing to do with the digital file she
can never entirely escape. Our character, ultimately, can't be judged by
strangers on the basis of our Facebook or Google profiles; it can be judged
by only those who know us and have time to evaluate our strengths and
weaknesses, face to face and in context, with insight and understanding. In
the meantime, as all of us stumble over the challenges of living in a world
without forgetting, we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of
defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new
ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us
forever.



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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