A Consultant's View
Prairie Trail Software, Inc. ............................................................. August 2010
Brain researchers are learning that memory is not just about remembering something. Often, equally important is the ability to forget something. Our society is built based on the ability to forget. That is the only way that the mass of humanity is able to ride the subway day after day to work and not be overwhelmed with remembering all the people we saw on the way.
Forgetting is not just "not remembering". It is also about making judgments about what is important to remember. We start with short term memory and only move the "important" events into long term memory.
Forgetting is an important part of social healing. Thus, religions have rites to "forgive" and to help the society heal. Western justice systems include ways to wipe a transgression off of the legal record. Countries that had major trauma often try to use a "truth commission" to get the story out so that people can let go of remembering. In the classic novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, the plot revolves around those who would not forget and forgive what was done (and the harm they caused by that remembering).
There are some people who have little or no ability to forget. Many of these people are not able to function in society because they can't determine what is important information and what is not. They can recite back to you everything that was said in a meeting, but not be able to filter and condense the information down. Because they can not forget, any hurt, any trauma is still just as raw as the day it happened. One such person described her life as agonizing.
Likewise, in business, forgetting is an important part of moving on into new fields and new markets. Thus, one of the most important learning curves at a company is the "Unlearning Curve". When moving on, a business has to "forget" how things worked five years ago and learn what works today. Sales channels keep changing as companies go out of business and new ones form.
Forgetting is a challenge for successful companies. Companies that thrived in one area often stumble as the market changed. Google dominates searches, but others are both figuring out how to "lie" to Google and to work around the perceived need for a search. One place even says that if a customer needs to do a search, that is almost a defect of their web site.
In order to forget, companies put in place procedures to identify what no longer works, develop strategies to move to the new, and do the painful changes to people so that they give up what they used to do.
The first time, Apple Computer did it at a cost of alienating many people within the company as they switched from the Apple II to the Macintosh. The second time, Steve Jobs had to leave the company for a number of years before he could come back and lead the company into a new way of doing business.
Forgetting is such an important part of humanity that, as a society, we not used to how nothing is getting forgotten on the Web. We are not used to people being able to track down everything we wrote 30 years ago. Nowadays, we are recording more and more of life and people are not ready for what will happen. Pictures posted many years ago can come back to haunt someone. As a society, we need to address how to forget and what to forget.
A researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that most computers give enough information when browsing to be able to identify "this computer". According to a Computerworld article, Peter Eckersley found that browsers are able to give back to the host computer enough information so that subsequent actions could be identified as coming from that same computer. And other research is showing that all browsers "leak" information when browsing.
What types of things are reportable? It turns out that the host can ask for a lot of stuff about the computer by sending down JavaScript commands. The JavaScript command System.getproperty can ask for the Operating System name, the version, which version of Java, and what your home directory is. Other commands can give what fonts are installed, what plugins you have in the browser, what name you signed into the computer with, what time zone the computer thinks it is in, and more. It turns out that the combination of all of these is fairly unique to each computer (where people are allowed to make choices). This information is being used by several places to identify when one person is trying to check out a set of stolen credit cards. The sites can stop responding to that many requests from the same computer.
There are several ways to avoid being tracked this way. In the corporate world, it turns out that perfectly "cloned" computers were impossible to distinguish from each other. The security people were correct to insist that some computers be set up exactly one way and the users are not allowed to add features or applications. Mobile devices are also hard to track. Finally, it is best to limit where one might be browsing.
The iPhone4 has one feature causing problems. It turns out that the screen can react to your cheek while talking. It is called "face dialing" when the phone decides that you want to hang up one call and start another. People have reported suddenly finding the phone has called their boss, clients, old girl friends etc. in the middle of another call. The "mute" button has also taken on itself to silence this side of the call leaving men with the accusation that they are not really listening to their wives.
Dave Randolph,
President, Prairie Trail Software
Prairie Trail Software provides the back end to the web with eCommerce, databases, web services, and provides custom software for merchant service providers including gift and loyalty solutions. Give us a call at 1-800-618-4199.