Rosen reports that a Microsoft survey concluded that 75% of employers Google job candidates. A person's online persona, pictures, and friends are, and will continue to be, a serious and competitive issue for young job-seekers. Young folks are at a particular disadvantage because of the generational and technological divide with the older workforce that is less likely to engage in social media and therefore doesn't have any skin in the game.

As the "text" generation becomes the older workforce, this divide should be less extreme. At the same time, the older we get, the more online history we create, so it is unclear how much the situation improves. The more "stuff" one has online the more one is open to misinterpretations and folly.

The main force of Rosen's article is that other websites can capture pictures of you posted online by you or your friends and that, unless some kind of action is taken, they will survive online indefinitely. That is a scary thought. Our status updates and tweets will outlive us all. Your own version of the "drunken pirate" may stalk you from school to job to job. Rosen cites Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age to address the importance of "societal forgetting." He says, "By 'erasing external memories,' our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior."

And the internet doesn't forget, at least not yet.

There is a theory in the history of philosophy that goes beyond erasing external memory. It is a notion I've been trying to digest for years now. It is that of "active forgetfulness" and it is Nietzsche's most dangerous idea.

The reasoning behind active forgetfulness is that the destruction of certain memories clears new space in your consciousness, a blank unhistorical slate, where one can create new values. For Nietzsche, creation and destruction go hand-in-hand. He argues that we should "serve history only to the extent that history serves life" (59). The historical and unhistorical are needed to ensure the health of an individual and a culture. Nietzsche continues (and remember this is published in 1874):

The oversaturation of an age with history seems to me to be hostile and dangerous to life in five respects: such an excess creates that contrast between the inner and the outer [...] and thereby weakens personality; it leads an age to imagine that it possesses the rarest of virtues, justice, to a greater degree of any other age; it disrupts the instincts of a people, and hinders the individual no less than the while in attainment of maturity [...] it leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself and subsequently in to the even more dangerous mood of cynicism; in this mood, however, it develops more and more a prudent practical egoism through which the forces of life are paralyzed and at last destroyed. [83]

Overcoming history, whether it be the memory of an individual or culture is possible due to the plasticity of humans to create our own way of life, our ability to transform and incorporate the past and what is foreign, and to heal wounds (62). Active forgetfulness facilitates this process as the doorkeeper of psychic order.

But how can we attempt to forget when our pasts have a life of their own online? How can we change and grow when we do not have control over what is put online or how long it stays there?

Regardless of whether it's actually possible to willfully forget or not, the idea that there needs to be a counterbalance to the constant production of material online or of the psyche is an important one. Memory and history are prized values in Western culture, but the ability to forget--to delete--maybe the virtue championed in the future.