The growing peculiarity of the missing delete key

Last night I was watching Pretty Persuasion (a random US teen-sex-comedy - this post contains fairly minor spoilers) and was struck by the lack of a sense of incongruity as the lead characters attempted to correct their various faux pas with the cry of "oops. Rewind!" One thought this a reasonable codicil to a stream of racist invective overheard by most of the school; another blurted it out in court when spectacularly caught out in an act of perjury.

I note the lack of a sense of incongruity because people (even Pretty Persuasion's clearly disturbed children) crying "rewind" in response to real-world events  might on some levels be thought pretty weird. It doesn't work. It can't work. The world does not in fact contain a "rewind" or indeed a "delete" button. An actual apology might be thought more apt.

But for people whose social interactions are increasingly mediated by technology, how weird is it the cry of "rewind" in response to real-world solecism? If you're used to interacting with people via webmail or MySpace or World of Warcraft the idea of a situation without a moment's reflection to hit "delete" rather than "send" is itself perhaps peculiar. What it reminds me of most, rather alarmingly, is the case in Japan of 11-year-old Satomi Mitarai (BBC) who stabbed her friend to death with a box cutter for calling her fat online, and then according to some sources claimed she wished to apologise personally to her dead friend. Commentators argued at the time that she had been habituated by videogames to the notion that characters would simply come back at the press of a button.

Now, psychosis is psychosis and I am not going to add my voice to the choir calling for the banning of anything and everything on grounds that it somehow promotes violence. Humans are, as Neal Stephenson tells us, "mimetic death machines" and the wonder for me is that civilisation gets through so many days without a massacre, not the occasional lapse where it does not. But it is curious how unremarkable the prospect of girls crying "rewind" at cold, hard reality can become, and odd how fundamental the delete key has become to our social lives. The more our interactions are mediated by technology, the more likely it seems we will expect the rewind key to always be there.