This remains a big problem with the web: Timelessness. It turns out that the ephemeral nature of offline commentary is a big feature. If I say something offhand in a bar I don't have to curate that statement forever, going back every few months to add some editorial comment about how my opinion has changed.
It struck me the other day that this is why archivists have trouble with the web. Old links go dead all the time. Various people have tried to convince web publishers that they should take the preservation of old links seriously - we are destroying history! But it isn't just that preserving old links is hard work - which it is - but that history is a terrible burden for the living. You are forced to curate and disclaim it, or risk having it held against you. It's much more comfortable to just walk away from your history and hope that it biodegrades.
Forgetfulness is a blessing, and few online systems provide it in any well-thought-out fashion. Users are forced to use hacks to achieve it.
How is this a problem with the web any more than anything? As soon as a thought leaves your mind and is engraved on some sort of medium (be it someone's memory, paper, or a webpage) it's out there for good.
Publishing thoughts on web, like print, demands rigour from the author and the reader. Read actively, write like you have an audience, and be skeptical.
As soon as a thought leaves your mind... it's out there for good.
This is another mindset endemic to engineers like myself: First-order thinking. The notion that, because a bit in a piece of flash RAM, a memory in someone's brain, and an etching on the wall of a thousand-year-old church are all the same to first order -- "persistent" storage of information -- they can therefore safely be treated as the same thing.
The second-order differences are pretty important. To pick just one particular example: Human memory is not just an incredibly fallable medium (you remember events that never happened, and your memory of events that did happen gets distorted over time and is situational, dependent on your current mood) but it is inevitably filtered through the personality of the rememberer. The only way to learn what a World War II veteran remembers about the war is to listen to what the veteran tells you. If the veteran happens to have been a personal friend of General Patton, they will tell you certain things about Patton. If the veteran was a sworn enemy of Patton, they will tell you other things about Patton. If you strive to prevent them from doing this consciously, they will do so unconsciously. Such is the nature of human memory and communication.
A photograph of Patton, or a written memoir, is an entirely different beast.
And, similarly, there is a big qualitative difference between a third-hand account of a conversation in a bar, an entry in a handwritten diary that is stored in your basement someplace, and a popular web page that has been downloaded a thousand times and is available on Bittorrent in case the original is taken down.
It struck me the other day that this is why archivists have trouble with the web. Old links go dead all the time. Various people have tried to convince web publishers that they should take the preservation of old links seriously - we are destroying history! But it isn't just that preserving old links is hard work - which it is - but that history is a terrible burden for the living. You are forced to curate and disclaim it, or risk having it held against you. It's much more comfortable to just walk away from your history and hope that it biodegrades.
Forgetfulness is a blessing, and few online systems provide it in any well-thought-out fashion. Users are forced to use hacks to achieve it.