The Right to Public Amnesia

                                               

                                            Santosh Desai ‘s column City City  Bang Bang in the latest Monday article The Right to Public Amnesia is bang on a complex issue of individual’s rights over his/her life and actions. Despite his lucid and argumentative style, the article that starts with a bang ends almost with a whimper as he has no answers to the disturbing question of one’s right to be forgotten in the age of internet where the ready availability of information renders it impossible for  the erasure of one’s actions from public memory. The cliche^’d truism ‘public memory is short’ has no validity in today’s age of advanced technology with its remarkable storage space in megabytes. Can public amnesia be restored as an individual’s right is only one part of the question. Implied in this question is that the action and sayings of the individual leave such a damaging imprint on the society that cannot be forgotten and swept under the carpet. The ethical question is how far an individual can claim as his right to privacy when s/he inhabits a collective space called society. The modern paradox is the current faith in individualism overstressing the importance of the individual to live and act as s/he  wishes , stays cheek by jowl with the  public scrutiny of his/her private life. Nothing can be hidden as everything gets recorded by technology and safely vaulted for posterity. Albert Einstein said: “Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.” But internet memory is permanent and cannot be changed. For example the acrimony and invidious personal attacks by politicians on their adversaries in the pre-poll days stay permanently recorded on the net that all the bonhomie they display post elections cannot be wiped out from the hard disk. To project oneself in a new avatar and get accepted is a gargantuan task because it is no longer the human memory at work but the internet memory with its vast storage space and instant retrievability.                                                            So in this era, it is not possible to be forgotten- yet another modern paradox as human nature always loves to be remembered. The modern technology thus puts the onus on us to act and say that leaves a lasting and feel-good imprint on the society that we live in. One small slip and we are netted into eternal incarceration. Instead of asking for a revival of public amnesia, we should accept the fact that we are today digitally born and should try to avoid being an embarrassment to our space in this new technological society of memory. Jean Paul Sartre speaking about human responsibility to the society wrote: “the only possibility of creating a human community is to accept the human condition-that we exist, that we must work, that we are mortal, that we are involved, that we must choose and that in choosing we invent ourselves and take full responsibility…it is up to us to give life a meaning and value is nothing else but the meaning that we choose.” In choosing our ethics, we make ourselves.

Do we still need to demand the right for public amnesia? Or do we accept the inevitability of being born into a digital world that does not have amnesia in its dictionary and allow it to record our life, action and sayings in a way that leave an imprint on society about which we need not be ever ashamed.