But I’m afraid this New York Times Magazine cover story hangs from some very thin reeds. It offers few concrete examples of the problems it laments, resorts to vague generalizations and straw men, and lists some truly preposterous proposed remedies.

Rosen presents his premise — that information once posted to the Web is permanent and indelible — as a given. But it’s highly debatable. In the near future, we are, I’d argue, far more likely to find ourselves trying to cope with the opposite problem: the Web “forgets” far too easily.

Rosen begins with the tale of Stacy Snyder, a Pennsylvania teacher in training who was denied her degree because her teachers’ college didn’t like a photo of her on Facebook. Snyder’s sin? Wearing a pirate hat in a party photo labeled “drunken pirate.” This outrageous promotion of alcohol consumption got her booted from her teaching school and deep-sixed her career. She sued, but a Federal district court has rejected her complaint.

It took me a few minutes of reading into Rosen’s many-thousands-of-words piece before I realized that Snyder’s story would be the only case of an actual person being damaged by the ostensible “end of forgetting” that Rosen would explore in any detail. On this meager evidence, he postulates “a collective identity crisis,” “an urgent problem” for all of society.

But does Snyder’s mistreatment have anything to do with the longevity of the information we post about ourselves online? It was a trivial indiscretion in the present that got her in trouble. Her tale, in fact, has little to do with “the end of forgetting.” You can blame Facebook, but shouldn’t you blame the school administrators and the federal judges even more? The photo is harmless; the trouble lies with the people who have turned it into a problem.

The only two other examples Rosen cites are similarly weak. There is a “16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, ‘I’m so totally bored!!!’ ” And a Canadian psychotherapist who was blocked at the US border because a guard turned up his description of an LSD trip 30 years before.

These are both injustices. But humorless bosses and overreaching immigration officials will be with us no matter how we reform Facebook.

People have been losing their jobs because of the Web for almost as long as there has been a Web. We get new stories of Internet-driven job loss with each new iteration of the form of participation — email, chat rooms, forums, blogs (where Heather “Dooce” Armstrong was the poster child, but let’s not forget Ellen Simonetti, Jessica Cutler, Mark Jen, and all the others who’ve been dooced — fired for blogging indiscretions), and now Facebook and Twitter. This is a problem, but one that has less to do with the nature of “digital forgetting” (firing-level indiscretions are nearly all contemporaneous) than with youthful hubris, overconfidence in anonymity, or the misfortune of having a vindictive employer.

With these less-than-ideal examples out of the way, Rosen can get to the heart of his material: He fears that the Internet’s archival memory of each of our missteps will make it impossible for any of us to wipe the slate clean and start afresh. Once, he argues, the Web offered a new frontier, which, like the Old West, allowed us to reinvent ourselves. But now that social safety valve is closed.

Rosen writes that this vision of the Web as frontier “has proved to be another myth.” In truth, it was always a myth. The Internet was never an alternate universe. It has always been interwoven with our “real” offline lives. It offered us new opportunities for expression and connection and imaginative play, and it still does, but only the very naive or the very deluded could ever think that what they did on the Web stayed on the Web.

Rosen maintains that our Internet-driven culture is making it harder for the disgraced to rebuild their lives and careers. But is there any actual evidence that anything has changed in this realm? As in the pre-Internet era, the ability to get up from a knockdown has less to do with making the world “forget” than with power, position and cash.

If you operate in the higher reaches of society, as a successful businessperson or political leader or intellectual, you will get your second act, whatever your shame. Henry Blodget is building a successful media company on the Web; Eliot Spitzer is hosting on CNN; sock-puppet maestro Lee Siegel publishes books and articles.

The people who have to worry are those on the lower rungs of the economy, who are in greater danger of losing jobs and homes and rights at the whim of bosses and bankers and bureaucrats. That problem, alas, predates the Web.

Rosen really loses me when he starts compiling “solutions” to the problem of the “end of forgetting.” Some of the options he lists with a straight face include: DMCA-style takedown notices for “false information” online — if someone publishes something you think is false, you get to serve them with a notice and they have to take it down! Can’t wait to start seeing those fly. Or what about resurrecting Microsoft’s Clippy — perhaps the most reviled software creation of all time — to offer a “reproachful look” at users who are about to upload some risque photo?

These ludicrous ideas don’t stand much chance of harassing us. Society will outgrow the “fired for Facebook” problem once an entire generation with a shared online past begins to take the reins. When everyone has party pictures on Facebook, no one will find them an impediment to employment or higher office. After all, once upon a time, a politician’s admission of past drug use meant kissing the White House goodbye.

In the meantime, of course, people ought to get smarter about what to share and what to keep private. I believe they will; one of my motivations for writing Say Everything was to try to help people learn from the experiences of early bloggers as they move their own lives online. I will also gladly join my voice to Rosen’s in support of giving users much more direct control of their data on services like Facebook. If it takes laws to insure that, let there be laws.

But Rosen is too busy hatching plans for “expire dates” on social-network postings and other artificial-forgetting schemes to give his head the Janus-turn his subject demands. The idea that the Web has a long memory is hardly new (here’s J.D. Lasica’s piece on how “The Web Never Forgets” from 1998). But there is a flipside to this notion: Information online can be fragile and fleeting, as well. There is an entropic quality to everything that is shared online. Data gets lost; servers die; databases are corrupted; formats fall into disuse; storage media deteriorate; backups fail.

The Web is now old enough for us to know just how badly links rot over time. Much of the material from the early days of the Web is already gone. Facebook and Twitter actually make it nearly impossible for you to find older material, even stuff that you’ve contributed yourself. The more dynamic the Web gets and the more stuff we move into “the cloud,” the less confident we can be that information that once was public will remain available to the public.

There are conferences on “digital preservation” these days because this is actually a serious and important problem. We need to solve it for the sake of future historians and for the sake of our descendants. We need, as Dave Winer puts it, to “future-safe” the culture we are creating together today.

In other words: I’m a lot less worried about the Web that never forgets than I am about the Web that can’t remember.

(I have to admit that the whistling volley loosed by the NPs last night was so solid, indeed so flawless, no stray sibilance or wobbles offkey, that I did wonder if it was live or sampled. I mean, the band members were whistling into their mikes. But these days, who knows?)

I was all set to write up a post about other great whistling songs, but soon discovered that it’s been done already.

The Spinner list is a pretty good one. But it’s heavy on songs that use whistling as a drop-in solo or a bridge or an outro. Those are great, but this aproach neglects examples in the grand “Colonel Bogey March/Bridge On the River Kwai” tradition — where the whistling carries the entire tune of a refrain.

My own favorite in this genre is Brian Eno’s “Back in Judy’s Jungle” — the missing link connecting the world of Colonel Bogey with that of “Crash Years.”

As for the rest of the New Pornographers show? With eight, sometimes more, people on stage, they have turned into indie power pop’s equivalent of a Big Band. Indeed, at times, with their tight harmonies and deep catalog of songs that feel like instant classics, they made me think of our era’s equivalent of the Band — with roots dug not in the country-folk tradition but instead in the now-long history of eccentric smart pop. Great, complex music: we’re lucky to have it.

My list, for your pleasure, is the decade in music — my personal bests. It will be no surprise to longtime readers here. This is the stuff that stuck with me through the years, that kept my body moving, my mind working and my heart opening. I’ve made most of these entries in pairs (or more) — because I can.

RUNNERS-UP:

• Beck: The Information (2006)
• The Decemberists: The Crane Wife (2006)
• The Gaslight Anthem: The 59 Sound (2008)
• Richard Thompson: 1000 Years of Popular Music (2003)
• Wrens: The Meadowlands (2003)
• XTC: Wasp Star (Apple Venus Vol. 2) (2000)

TOP TEN (IN ELEVEN):

(11) Garage Band and Rock Band: Apple’s software put remarkably high quality basement-taping music-making tools onto every Mac. Rock Band may be a toy, but it’s irresistible, and it schools young minds and bodies in the notion that music is to be made as well as consumed.

(10) Pernice Brothers: The World Won’t End (2001); Discover a Lovelier You (2005) — Definitely the sleeper in this bunch for me. When I first heard Joe Pernice’s work in 1998′s Overcome by Happiness I was impressed but a bit bored. Over time I came to appreciate, then crave, the combination of lush pop arrangements and astringent lyrics.

(9) They Might Be Giants: No (2002); Here Come the ABCs (2005)– For me this decade was all about raising a pair of twin boys. TMBG’s forays into children’s music were that process’s soundtrack — and frequent tonic. “No” offered my three-year-olds an early introduction to absurdism, and its charming animations proved an endless diversion. (“Robot Parade” introduced them to the term “cyborg” — and gave them a chance to misremember it as “borg-cy,” which we will never forget.) And even though, by the time “ABCs” came along, the alphabet had long been mastered, the music (and great accompanying videos) won over kids and grownups alike.

(8) The Long Winters: When I Pretend to Fall (2003); Putting the Days to Bed (2006) — Sharp tuneful alt-rock with an edge and a brain. My only complaint about singer/songwriter John Roderick? Low productivity!

(7) The Fiery Furnaces: Blueberry Boat — The Friedbergers, brother and sister, moved from the more forthright songwriting of their early tracks to the increasing obscurity of their more recent work. But along the way they created this masterpiece of baroque verbiage and extravagant music.

(6) Tobin Sprout: Lost Planets and Phantom Voices (2003) — Deep autumnal soundscapes and pop paintings from a maestro of gentle melody. The former Guided by Voices songwriter, far less profligate with his talent than that group’s leader, Robert Pollard, hasn’t put out an album since; he seems to be concentrating on painting these days. Too bad!

(5) Green Day: American Idiot (2004); and The Thermals: The Body, the Blood, the Machine (2006)– Two punk operas about Bush-era America. Green Day’s megahit album drafted Who-style song suites and hook-laden power-trio riffs in the service of a narrative about disaffected no-future youth; the Thermals channeled a Buzzcocks sound for their grim portrait of a young couple trying to escape a fundamentalist/fascist America.

(4) Mekons: Natural (2007) — These veterans kept producing challenging, creative work through the decade. Each album, from Journey to the Edge of the Night (2000) to OOOH (2002) to Natural, improved on its predecessor. Natural is the band’s version of pastoral — a contemplative, acoustic-heavy set of laments for the end of nature.

(3) Frank Black/Black Francis: Dog in the Sand (2001); Bluefinger (2007) — FB/BF has been as prolific with his songs as he is fickle with his stage name. These albums were his peaks of the decade. Dog in the Sand ranged from fierce Stones-style rockers to the almost unbearably beautiful “St. Francis Dam Disaster.” Bluefinger used the story of Dutch glam-rocker Hermann Brood as the spine for a memorable set of Black classics.

(2) The New Pornographers: Twin Cinema (2005), Challengers (2007) — I do not know how A.C. Newman and his cohorts do it, but each album adds to my respect for their genius. When I read somewhere in an interview that Newman is a big fan of Eno’s “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” it all made sense.

(1) The Mountain Goats: Tallahassee (2003), We Shall All Be Healed (2004), The Sunset Tree (2005) — Don’t think I’d have made it through these years without John Darnielle’s music. Thank you. Happy new year!

The feature noted that photographer Edgar Martins “creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.” Now it turns out the Times has removed the photos from its website and posted an embarrassing editor’s note admitting that the photos had been “digitally manipulated: “Most of the images,” the editors wanly declare, “did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show.” It seems that, in some sort of misguided effort to create more pleasing images, Martins duplicated and then flipped portions of some photos to create a barely perceptible mirror image: a sort of fearful — but now, we know, bogus — symmetry.

As I read up on the controversy (here’s the original conversation on Metafilter that exposed the matter, here’s Simon Owens’ account of how that happened, and here’s some photographic detail) I had two thoughts: One, sounds like this photographer didn’t come clean to his editors, and that’s unprofessional and probably unforgivable. But, two: the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show? Huh? Does any image? Can any image? Or article, or representation of any sort?

Before I get any more Borgesian on you, let me point you back to the interviews I did with the photographer and multimedia artist Pedro Meyer back in the early 90s — one from the San Francisco Examiner, and one from Wired. (Please note that the Wired piece got mangled somewhere between the magazine and the Web; the intro paragraph appears at the end.)

This, from the Examiner piece:

Pedro Meyer points to one of his photographs and says, “Tell me what’s been altered in this picture.”

The photo shows a huge wooden chair on a pedestal – a Brobdingnagian seat that looms over the buildings in the background with the displaced mystery of an Easter Island sculpture.

It’s difficult to say what’s going on here: A trompe l’oeil perspective trick? Or the product of digital special effects?

Meyer is a serious artist and philosopher of technology, but today he’s playing a little game of “what’s wrong with this picture?”… The truth about the chair photo is that it’s a “straight” image: It’s just a really big chair.

Meyer says he took the shot outside an old furniture factory in Washington, D.C. But the self-evidently transformed pictures that surround it in his exhibit – like that of a pint-sized old woman on a checkerboard table carrying a torch toward an angelic girl many times her size – call its accuracy into question. We stare and distrust our eyes.

So is Pedro Meyer, who started out as a traditional documentary photographer, out to subvert our faith in the photographic image, our notion that “pictures never lie”? You better believe it.

“I think it’s very important for people to realize that images are not a representation of reality,” Meyer says. “The sooner that myth is destroyed and buried, the better for society all around.”

[You can see that chair photo in the "Truths and Fictions" gallery available off this page -- click through to screen 26.]

And this, from the Wired interview:

I’m not suggesting that a photograph cannot be trustworthy. But it isn’t trustworthy simply because it’s a picture. It is trustworthy if someone we trust made it.

You’re interviewing me right now, you’re taking notes and taping the conversation, and at the end you will sit down and edit. You won’t be able to put in everything we talked about: you’ll highlight some things over others. Somebody reading your piece in a critical sense will understand that your value judgments shape it. That’s perfectly legitimate. Turn it around: let me take a portrait of you, and suddenly people say, That’s the way he was.

We don’t trust words because they’re words, but we trust pictures because they’re pictures. That’s crazy. It’s our responsibility to investigate the truth, to approach images with care and caution.

After learning what Meyer was trying to teach me, I can’t get too huffy about Martins’ work. There is no sharp easy line between photos that are “manipulated” and those that aren’t; there is a spectrum of practice, and when a photo is cropped or artificially lit or color-adjusted or sharpened or filtered in any way it is already being manipulated, even if Photoshop is never employed. Martins’ pictures are beautiful and arresting, and if he’d simply told the world what he was up to, I don’t think anyone would be too upset.

Of course, if Martins had been forthright the Times would probably not have printed his work, because it has an institutional commitment to, I guess, attempt to “wholly reflect” reality. Somehow.

I don’t demand that of photographers or journalists or newspapers. I just ask them to tell me what they’re up to. As David Weinberger put it at the Personal Democracy Forum: “Transparency is the new objectivity.”

I never had much luck applying for internships in college. Part of it was, I’m sure, the times (the late ’70s and early ’80s were almost as brutal a time in publishing as the present) and part of it was my own belief that self-promotion was uncool and my talents spoke for themselves. But my junior year I did finally land an internship reporting and writing for the American Lawyer monthly — something I now recognize as a startup company led by a young journalist named Steven Brill. My heart lay in writing arts criticism, but I had a good head for investigative reporting and I knew a little about the law, so I took the job and got a few clips, and got to know a colorful (and incredibly talented) gang of future luminaries like Jim Cramer, Jill Abramson, James Stewart, Connie Bruck and many others.

John Mortimer

I wrote stories about lawyers and law firms, but I really wanted to write about playwrights and artists. So when I started freelancing full time after graduation I pitched the editors at American Lawyer with ideas for pieces about the occasional overlap cases — people like Louis Auchincloss and John Mortimer. In 1982 Mortimer’s wonderful autobiography Clinging to the Wreckage had just come out in the US, and Mortimer was doing interviews in NY, so I got to meet him. He decided that our interview should take place at Maxwell’s Plum, the legendary but by then (to me) tacky East Side cafe and singles bar, because he’d once set a scene in a story there but had never actually set foot inside. So the tape of my otherwise delightful interview with this drily charming subject was rendered nearly untranscribeable by the loud chatter of the surrounding wannabe-socialite gaggle. At that stage of my career I was still sometimes intimidated by the prospect of interviewing writers I admired; Mortimer was the kind of conversationalist who got me over that generously and quickly. The American Lawyer piece from 1982 isn’t online but a second interview I did with him years later, at Salon, still is.

Here’s Charles McGrath’s Times appreciation. McGrath, like nearly every other obit writer, reminds us of Mortimer’s label as a “champagne socialist,” one that he embraced. He may have lived just long enough to see its utility return for a new era of cheerful crusading on the left.

Readers of Salon and the New York Times Book Review know Laura Miller’s critical writing by its wisdom, range, power and clarity. Her new book, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, is her first (she also edited Salon’s Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors). It’s an unusual combination of personal memoir and literary criticism that is about, among other things, Narnia, childhood imagination, memory and the power of stories. I was always more of a Tolkien guy than a Narnian; I think by the time I got to Lewis’s books their Christian subtexts did not look “sub” at all to me, and I found the whole thing an exercise in crude allegory. But if anyone can make me understand their power, I imagine it will be Laura. If you read this excerpt from the book recently posted at Salon, you’ll see why. (Here’s Laura’s website for the book.)

My professional path has crossed multiple times with Mike Sragow’s: He’s now the movie critic for the Baltimore Sun. When I met him he was the movie critic and editor for the Boston Phoenix, where he encouraged me to write about movies (I’d limited myself to theater and books). Then we worked together at the SF Examiner, and again at Salon. For me, he has always been the best kind of mentor; for his readers, he has always been an incisive, insightful and deeply knowledgeable critic.

Mike’s new book, his first (he also edited a couple of anthologies for the National Society of Film Critics), is Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master — a biography of the director of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, whose reputation and swashbuckling life story have long been neglected. Here’s a Wall Street Journal review by Peter Bogdanovich, who calls the book “evocative, layered, engaged, graceful and compelling”; here’s another review of it from today’s N.Y. Times.

I can’t wait to read both of these books — soon as I’m done poring over edits on my own…

Eno has had a long and storied career since as the creator of ambient music, a producer of wonderful albums by Talking Heads and U2 and many others, and a multimedia artist. But one of the things that he no longer seems to do, much, is sing. He did, some, on a collaboration with John Cale from 1990 titled “Wrong Way Up.” But mostly, these days, he doesn’t. Now, his voice is not a conventionally “good” voice, but I always enjoyed it, and I’ve missed hearing it in new music. [UPDATE -- yeah, I forgot about the 2005 Another Day on Earth, probably because I never got that into it. Should try it again...]

All of which is by way of introduction to this delightful piece Eno recently contributed to the NPR series “This I Believe,” in which Eno declares that what he believes in is…singing. It’s a strange admission for him to make after all these years — like, I don’t know, Harpo Marx espousing the virtues of speech, or Greta Garbo expressing her love of crowds. But he makes a good case.

A recent long-term study conducted in Scandinavia sought to discover which activities related to a healthy and happy later life. Three stood out: camping, dancing and singing…. When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

[thanks to Kottke for the link]

At the time, Hyde’s effort to establish a language of value separate from the financial marketplace spoke hauntingly to me — as a disaffected young liberal stunned by the Reaganite rise of free-market, anti-government ideology. The book’s themes feel somehow timely again today, at the end of the arc of history that began a quarter-century ago, as we scrabble through the ruins that said ideology has left of our economy and try to imagine rebuilding along different lines.

I was fascinated to learn from the Times piece that in the years since, The Gift has become a volume of almost totemic stature to writers like David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem and others whom I admire. I’d written that Hyde’s book would “probably be most read and appreciated by those who already grasp its lessons, the visionary writers and artists from whom Hyde draws so many examples.” It appears I was right. But I’m glad to know that the book has had such perennial success — and that Hyde, now a fellow at the Berkman center, has moved on to studying the concept of the “commons,” newly relevant in the Web era. I’ll look forward to his work on that topic.

In the meantime, if you want to read more, I’ve reposted that 1983 review of The Gift, which holds up pretty well, I think (though today I’d write a less involuted lead!).

Ah, well. You can still find such pieces in the Atlantic (like this one about rising crime rates in mid-sized American cities), but Carr’s isn’t one of them. At 4000 words, it’s barely longer than the kind of thing Salon does every day. It’s a provocative read scattered with tasty quotes and anecdotes; it asks a useful question but does little to answer it. Carr starts off describing a sense of alienation from old-fashioned reading that he shares with several other people he quotes:

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Like Carr, I’ve found myself reading fewer books over the past decade. I can’t tell whether it’s because I’m spending more time on the Web (certainly possible). In my case, if my attention span has shortened at all, I think it’s far more likely that, for instance, raising children has cut into both my available time and my reserve of repose (both actual physical sleep time and emotional reserve of patience). But when I do get the chance to sit back with a good book — like two I’ve recently finished, Faking It (with related blog by authors Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker) and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (also with author blog) — I don’t feel any less absorbed than when I was a teenager plowing my way through a shelf of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

I don’t want to discourage you from reading Carr’s article and pondering the issues it raises. Does Google represent the digital apotheosis of Taylorism (the industrial-age science of labor measurement)? Does the Web crowd out the opportunity for leisurely contemplation or “slow, concentrated thought”? Those of us who use the Web constantly are probably experiencing changes in how we read and think; what are those changes?

These aren’t stupid questions. But they deserve deeper contemplation than Carr has provided. His piece is less like a thoroughly researched magazine piece than, say, the prospectus for a writing project. Perhaps the Atlantic has simply published Carr’s next book proposal. If so, I’d look forward to reading the resulting book — in a relaxed, contemplative way, of course.

Further discussion from Matthew Ingram, Matt Asay and Blaise Alleyne.

UPDATE: Jon Udell finds Carr’s critique “spot on.”

The first thing to do is learn how to breathe — very deep breaths, slow. Then you stand in one position if you’re going to conduct, or sing, or whatever, for about a minute, and you deliberately relax every muscle in your body. You become aware of the fact that quite a few muscles are tense, so you relax them, all the way down to the calves of your legs. Then you take one more very slow breath.

And then you say to yourself, what I do here is of no importance whatsoever. I am here as a servant. And if I’m nervous, it means that I think what I’m doing is important. That is an egocentricity which no interpreter can allow himself the luxury of. You’re there to serve the music, and you have to be in the best postiion, psychological and physiological, to do so. Which means no tension, no nerves. Yes, exhilaration. Yes, enthusiasm. Yes, focused energy. But no nervousness. Because that’s counterproductive.