Wouldn't it be great if each of us had a photographic memory? One of my dissertation advisors did. Everything he ever read in his life he could recall word for word. Often he would close his eyes, place his palm to his head, and begin reading, from memory, some research report he had read years back. I wished I could do that. But today, I'm not so sure.

Forgetting versus Perpetuity
The default setting for the vast majority of humanity is to forget. And I've come to realize that forgetting has its rewards. What's that new adage: "What happens in Vegas stays... on Google, on Facebook, on YouTube...".

Forgetting allows people the human space required to grow, mature, and change over time--all of which are fundamental aspects of the human experience we certainly don't want to lose in the digital age. As a middle school educator, I have often met former students who had such difficulty as adolescents. But they grew up to be wonderful adults, often embarrassed at running into me fearing I still remembered the trials and tribulations of their relatively recent past.

In this example, I allowed context and perspective to play a significant part in remembering, and I extended the hope that I had forgotten. I do believe that change is not just possible, but usually inevitable.

But the digital world in which we live changes these important default settings. The past never goes away. Change might never have happened or is not assimilated quickly enough to matter in the present. Context and perspective are often absent from the databased information.

Anonymity versus Publicity
But this isn't the only default setting that is being turned on its head in our digital age. Pervasive monitoring accompanies eternal memory and storage. Everywhere I go, I am watched by unseen eyes. This data can be stored so cheaply, it probably will never go away.

You see, I want to be able to run a red light at 1:00AM when there is not a single person or vehicle within miles of me. I actually think I'm doing a good thing when I run that light: I'm trying to conserve fossil fuels, reduce transportation costs, and use time efficiently.

Moral Wisdom versus Binary Choices
But now, I might be at a traffic light that will use its digital systems to issue me a citation. Included in that data will be no mention of the good judgements I was trying to make in breaking the rules of the road in a safe way. So the digital grid is now depriving me of the capacity to exercise moral wisdom and common sense--and not just me, but everyone in the society.

We are now being squeezed into rigid perceptions of what is right and wrong, good or bad, acceptable or not--those regrettable, reductive binary choices that neglect all of the possibilities that live between on and off, which is all the microchip can assess. The human condition is much richer than that.

Balancing the Future
As we move forward, we need to keep our human limitations and default settings in mind, not to hold us back, but to keep the defaults of the life experience moving forward more humane.