The Future of Ephemeral Conversation
Schneier makes some interesting points about digital communication (and specifically ephemeral conversation). Basically he says that in a world where everything is recorded and (most often) permanently stored, what happens to the ephemeral conversation that once passed into the ether after it was uttered? As he puts it, “Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed.”
Anyway, it’s a good read, Shneier as always makes some good points and asks whether we should be making more efforts to protect this type of conversation so that everyone doesn’t turn into politicians who are forced to watch every word and give away their BlackBerrys (or at least not as extreme as politicians are).
Hi, I'm 
Thanks for the link: I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the “permanent digital weight” of the data we create around our lives, but failing at finding a way to express it.
As he points out, the change is cultural: and I believe the cultural change is more powerful than the technological. I don’t think we can technologically protect these conversations: we have to become more culturally aware and more forgiving of the slip-ups.
Maybe we can only forgive the slip-ups of our leaders if we’re all exposed to our own “humanness”?