When Folly Is Forever
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704597704574485742145322708.html
"Historians, accustomed to rummaging through document-stuffed archives, are now worrying about the future of the past. Our lives, they note, are ever more digitized: family joys and sorrows, work-place successes and setbacks, government directives and debates, are increasingly composed and conveyed digitally. The seeming ephemerality of these records—their formats may become obsolete or they may otherwise blip out of existence—has led to fears of a "digital dark age." Archivists and librarians have looked for strategies to preserve digital public records, with mixed success. As futurist Stewart Brand put it a few years ago: "There is still nothing in the digital world like acid-free paper."
But maybe the historians have it backward. In "Delete," Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that we should be less troubled by the fleetingness of our digital records than by the way they can linger. You may scoff—especially if you have ever lost valuable files on an irreparably damaged hard drive—but Mr. Mayer-Schönberger, a professor at Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, believes that we are not losing enough of our digital data. We are, he says, "failing to forget...
...So forgetting, the default mode for millennia, today requires effort and expense. "With the help of digital tools we—individually and as a society—have begun to unlearn forgetting," Mr. Mayer-Schönberger says. We have erased "from our daily practices one of the most fundamental behavioral mechanisms of humankind."
The implications are uncertain but potentially troubling. "Will our children be outspoken in online equivalents of school newspapers if they fear their blunt words might hurt their future career?" Mr. Mayer-Schönberger asks. "Will we protest against corporate greed or environmental destruction if we worry that these corporations may in some distant future refuse doing business with us?" We once could remake our lives; we could improve ourselves and even seek redemption by shedding our past. Mr. Mayer-Schönberger fears the oppressive weight of a past always with us.
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New Perspectives On The Work/(Life) Conundrum http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704597704574485742145322708.html#printMode"...In an article about growing disenchantment at work (“Hating What You Do”), this week’s Economist cites a survey conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy. It found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of workers who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%, and the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%. Furthermore, the article refers to a more recent survey by DDI which found that more than half of the respondents described their job as “stagnant,” as in “nothing interesting to do” and “little hope of professional growth" within their current organization. Half of these “stagnators” said they were planning to look for another job as soon as the economy recovered. These survey findings are flanked by several recent cultural events in the US that indicate a shift in the way we negotiate the meaning of work, for example Michael Moore’s “Capitalism – A Love Story” and a whole New York Times Magazine issue on “Anxiety.”
And yet, Americans will be surprised to hear that the most dramatic manifestation of this apparent misery-at-work trend occurred in “socialist” France. A spate of attempted and successful suicides at France Telecom that occured over the past twelve months, many of them explicitly prompted by stress and dissatisfaction at work, forced the deputy CEO to resign and sparked an emotional national debate about life in the modern corporation."
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In Interview with Dan Pinkhttp://lateralaction.com/articles/dan-pink/"Dan’s new book, Drive, is subtitled ‘the surprising truth about what motivates us’. It introduces some scientific research that turns received business practice on its head – and offers all of us a more inspiring and meaningful vision of work."
