No thinking about digital memories today can avoid the pioneering experiment of Gordon Bell, MyLifeBits:
Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.
Having followed Bell for a while, I am looking forward to his book, Total Recall, which will come out this month. In the book, Bell proposes to answer the question: “How the E-Memory revolution will change everything”.
Some will probably reply that Bell, who constantly wears digital recording devises around his neck, has not only gone paperless but also amnesic, while others might claim that Bell has freed his brain (and his personal archive) from an unruly mass of experiences and paper leaving more space in the brain for other, more important stuff.
With this experiment we are back at Plato’s dialogue Phaidrus and its retelling of a legend of writing and memory: The Egyptian God Theuth offers King Thamus the gift of writing as a remedy for the memory, but Thamus will have nothing of it. He thinks writing will have the opposite effect; it is a remedy for reminding, not remembering; it has the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. The problem for Socrates being that words when written down have ceased to be controlled by the speaker, they are detached, they cannot speak on their own or come to their own defense.
While our reluctance to commit our memories to writing (by hand and in print) has vanished over time as we have become familiar with the discursive technologies of words and writing, a new reluctance (or at least scepticism) follows Bell’s exploration of the very limits between corporeal and digital existence – well, more will be said when the book hits the stores (or ebook readers) on September 17. Until then, I am following the blog anticipating the book.
I came across your blog while searching for information on Gordon bell. I have just received his book in the post and am about to commence reading of it.
I have been fascinated by “life-streaming” or blogging since I first became aware of Steve Mann a few years back. The idea of being able to archive one’s entire life intrigues me. The big problem I can see is not in capturing life events, but in being able to catalogue and then later retrieve specific moments from the mass of data that would be accumulated. I am hoping that this book will shed some light on how far developments and research has come in this fascinating field.
Thanks for the comment, Andy. I have to wait a week till I’m back in London to read the book. It will surely give some insights into the mass of technologies and archive-retrival software involved. I also hope there will be some thoughts on what this vast archive of retriveable “memories” or experiences has had on Bell’s perception of more philosophical matters regarding his life, past, present, future. I imagine that engaging with extreme “experience preservation” such as this will be a time consuming endeavour. So my questions are, does the archiving and archive retrival influence what he decides to do in his every day life, are his experiences already pre-determined by his detachment as digital witness to his own life? Maybe this is too much to expect, and just having an insight into what he has actually done would be interesting enough for me. Please share your thoughts on the book when you have read it.