Offloading Your Memories

The Times Magazine asked me to contribute a little essay to their always entertaining Year In Ideas issue -- this one on a number of new research projects attempting to record everything in a human life: not just all the email sent and received, or web sites visited, but also the audio of every phone call, and in some cases, video of every waking hour. For space reasons, the piece dropped down a few hundred words, and lost a (somewhat predictable) little riff about how this connects to Vannevar Bush's original vision of the Memex, which was all about using machines to extend our memory. But of course, the Bush vision is really about academic memory -- it's all about being able to track down that reference to the Gettysburg Address that you read five years ago and have almost forgotten. These new projects, on the other hand, are much more clearly directed to the stray details of everyday life. It's not so much remembering some academic treatise as it is being able to determine, for once and for all, who really started that marital spat that's been simmering for three weeks now...

While you're reading through the Times Mag issue, be sure to check out a few ideas that have been percolating around this site for the past year: Social Networks, Video Games As Art, and most recently, Forget The South.

Comments

[Anil]

I'd been thinking about these ideas a lot recently (I called it the personal panopticon) and I'm really excited about the idea of having an audience as large as the Times' getting used to this idea being inevitable.

The social/cultural changes required for people to accept the existence of this kind of technology seem to be the much bigger obstacle than the hardware or software challenges; Watching that evolution will be fascinating.

[Bill Seitz]

Now all those marriage arguments will finally be resolved!

[Bill Seitz]

Time to work on those smell recorders...

[Bill Seitz]

Now every babbling psycho can put "content producer" on his vcard! (insert dot-com joke here)

[Susan]

It is getting mighty close to Christmas! Time for all youse to lighten up :D

A couple was walking down the street one night, when the woman felt a drop hit her nose.

"I think it's raining," she said to her husband.

"No, that felt more like snow to me," he replied.

"No, I'm sure it was just rain" she said.

Well, as these things go, they were about to have a major argument about whether it was raining or snowing. Just then they saw a politicial official walking towards them.

"Let's not fight about it," the wife said, "let's ask Senator Rudolph whether it's officially raining or snowing." As the official approached, the woman said, "Tell us, Senator Rudolph, is it officially raining or snowing?"

"It's raining, of course," he replied, and walked on.

But the man insisted, "I know that felt like snow!"

To which the woman quietly replied:

*
*
*
*
*
*wait for it
*
*
*
*
*
*
*you're gonna regret this
*
*
*
*
*
*
*hee hee hee

"Rudolph the Red knows rain dear."

TOLD YA!

All the best of the Season everyone!

[Dixon]

Hey, Steven, why don't you upload the unabridged article, since NYT will soon hide your article in the paying customer's section anyway?

As a compulsive documenter, I would love aspects of the system you're proposing.

On the other hand, I spent yesterday sorting through one closet of photo negatives, old letters from friends, and old artworks, etc. while simultaneously dumping some old analog videos to digital camera and computer... it's overwhelming.

In a way, I might be partially proving your point. Because I did not compulsively organize all this info as it came in, it is now a jumbled mess. Sorting it out, digitizing, and archiving is a pain. But a searchable repository would be sweet!

[Camilo]

Makes sense to forget the South, and then move on to those places that have opportunity because of economic circumstances, such as OH. And initiate strategies involving a broader base (such as Dean is doing).
And speaking of forgetting, we could use some selective memory. Imagine absolute recall: every event, all our sorrows, all our joys.
That, or a better archiving system.

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[Dinah]

I'm finding as I begin the daunting task of filling in the rest of my life before the blog that not only would having more data be daunting, it would yield a less perceivable portrait of me. Filters can add value to data, I find, so I see a lot of benefit in the fact that while I have almost all my journals, many of the personal letters I ever received in my life, and lots & lots of other memorabilia, I do not have everything. What I saved, what survived the moves I made does reflect my perception of what is important to me and therefore contributes to a portrait of me.

I do wish I had every piece of real writing & art I ever did. Not the "Dear sir or madam, please close my account as I have now paid off the balance in full" stuff, but the creative writing pieces, the letters I sent (as opposed to the letters received many of which I have), the little art projects (sometime around 1990 I did this great little animation piece in Hypercard which I deeply regret having lost), etc.

It would also be great to have a picture of me from every month of my life and a picture of every place I ever went to school or lived or worked and a picture of everyone I've ever interacted with regularly. Pictures do bring back memories, which is to say, they remind me of stories and the stories is what I really want to preserve of my life.

(Cue Tim Burton's new movie "Big Fish"...)

[Isaac]

Let's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.

[Gpo4]

nice... :)