Right to be forgotten? Most of us are still trying to be remembered

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/30/right-to-be-forgotten-most-trying-remembered

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The famous dream of being wiped from the web. Take former Formula One head Max Mosley, who has launched legal action against Google demanding the removal of images of him at a sex party from the search engine. Most of the rest of us know all too well about being forgotten.

A blog I began a few years ago – a stunningly successful experiment in national secrecy located several thousand miles up a winding gorge in the outer reaches of the internet – had, like most blogs, all the virtual footfall of a moon crater in low season. In terms of impact, I’d have made more of an impression standing on an upturned bucket beside a motorway, performing interpretative dance to passing truck drivers.

I’m not alone. From musicians to entrepreneurs, writers to pop-up burger chefs, millions are desperately perspiring at the coal-face of the attention economy. One hundred and eighty-one million blogs were recorded by Nielsen in 2011. The best part of half a billion tweets are now sent daily. Facebook, Blogger and Twitter regularly invite us to study the analytics for our posts and pages.

“I always make sure I can see the Twitter screen on my laptop when I am writing,” self-publishing author Ben Galley declares, just one of an army of unpaid e-authors who rise at dawn to promote themselves on social media before their paid job. A raft of startups like ClickSubmit and Outbrain promise to get you noticed on the net; trades from handymen to hoteliers face the prospect that unless they get busily networking to take on Airbnb and other Web 2.0 disrupters, they’ll end up biting analogue dust.

And yet with the rise of “erase your history” software such as X-pire! and ephemeral apps like Snapchat and Wickr, we seem preoccupied with an urge for removal and erasure – an idea now enshrined in European legislation. Whether individuals have the right to remove their own digital footprint is a good question, but it ignores the plight of a much larger but less celebrated group: those working hard at being remembered in the first place.

Here we meet some grim realities. The average blog is followed by a handful of readers, while 90% of tweets are never retweeted. Stories of Twitter cascades and viral news are skewed by concentrating on the tiny proportion of success stories, while audiences of mere handfuls greet millions of hopeful uploaders on to YouTube, SoundCloud and Kindle (most self-published ebooks sell fewer than 100 copies).

In other words, the social web is a place of stark power law distributions – a tiny number of people commanding all of the attention, while the vast majority languish on the long tail, heard, seen and read by almost nobody. Most online article pages are read only for a few seconds before large numbers of their readers “bounce”; search engines quickly bury old news beneath a tidal wave of the new.

By saturating us with a sea of information, the web acts like a giant version of Orwell’s “memory hole” – consigning thoughts, fears and feelings to virtual oblivion by covering them with ceaseless white noise – while at the same time preserving the worst of the “little brother” volunteer surveillance state: embarrassing selfies and party pics, unfair reviews, a misjudged tweet with disastrous consequences. The result is a vast “lumpen commentariat” who have the right to say anything so long as none of it leaves a lasting impression.

Governments are well aware of this power of media saturation as a tool for inducing political amnesia. While 20th-century censorship worked mostly by suppressing the information supply, in our own age armies of volunteer piece-workers such as China’s “50 cent party” are paid to obfuscate hot issues by incessant and irrelevant blogging. Such “spamizdat” is also alive and well in democratic countries with bombardment techniques like astroturfing and “snowing”.

As we risk being drowned in the din, and the demands of the attention economy creep upwards, we should spare a thought for the millions blogging, uploading and tweeting in the hope someone will notice. They have the right to be remembered as well as forgotten.