When you can remember everything with 100% perfection there is no distinction anymore between the food you're eating and the food you ate 20 years ago. Between the people you're with and the people you knew long ago. And so on.
In one of Aldous Huxley's books (island) there is the Minah bird, whose main role in life is to remind people to live 'here and now'. This is the opposite of that. Either you'll end up re-living the past all the time or you will end up not using it.
Either way I don't see the benefit. I'd rather live here and now and eventually forget than to be addicted to my own past, my memory is more than good enough as it is.
The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat people with deficiencies in this area.
The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat people with deficiencies in this area.
Yes, some research shows that reviewing the things an Alzheimer's patient did that day, along with other pertinent facts, slows the degeneration. I've long wondered if memory loss behaves similar to traditional forgetting of facts, if you could do training similar to spaced repetition to combat it long-term, or if it only works in early stages.
For the last several years, I've been considering the greatest beneficiaries of a perfect digital memory may not be ourselves at all, but our descendants: I am also aware that I will not care about every minute of footage in 20 years. The problem is, I don’t have the foggiest idea which minutes I’ll care about, and I am not ready to let go of any of it yet.http://web.archive.org/web/20100529070919/http://diveintomar...
You have no idea what your children will find interesting or important, and to presume to edit your life down or to not record it at all, while entirely within your right, might perhaps be considered negligent in the future. We all have crazy uncles and adventuring grandfathers whose stories we have only heard fragments of, which we'd love to know more about. Wearable computing and lifelogging may be an answer to that, a way to enable that sort of generational storytelling.
This is my life and I get to do with it what I want. If my descendants want to have interesting lives they'll have to go and make their own, not piggy-back on mine.
And if they truly believe I've been negligent they're welcome to pass their inheritance to their siblings.
In the PDF deck I linked to about my work, I describe storytelling like this:
Storytelling is sensemaking and placemaking of the: past (genealogy), present (diaries and journals) and future (personal [digital] archives).
At PDA2012, there had to have been half a dozen personal storytelling startups, most with a genealogy hook.
You have all the time in the world to scan photos, to write in your diary, but you're running out of time to ask your grandmother how she got that scar, or your grandfather why his hair turned white in the war.
Perhaps you've never been curious about your forebears, but to discount the possibility entirely out of fear that your children's children will enjoy pop-pop's stories so much they'll forget to live their own lives seems churlish to me.
I've read my grandmothers diary. It was extremely interesting, especially because I got a first persons account of world war II, and the way it affected her and the rest of the family.
But I don't feel like I have some kind of right to know anything beyond what she chose to tell and I hope my kids will have the good grace to look at me in a similar way. By the looks of it that won't be a problem.
It's one thing to be interested about ones forebears, another to be obsessed by it. When my mom went all out on some genealogy site and put all of my details in there as well as those of my spouse, kids and so on we asked her to please stop doing that.
Besides the obvious privacy angles I don't think kids that can't stand up for their rights should be included in the documentation that others place online, by the same token my kids and their descendants don't have an automatic right to any level of detail about me.
I remember that one of the dictators (Kim Yong-Il iirc) of NK had a film crew following him making a documentary about his life. The guy was batshit insane, and I feel that anybody that wants to document their live to that extent has an overgrown feeling of self importance.
I think this is a great illustration of the privacy (and thus related legal) issues that simply aren't being addressed in the research and commercialization efforts thus far. We saw a little of this with Instagram's photomap, that people's locations were being "outed" because they were tagged in someone else's photo and that person chose to make their locations public, but it's going to get more complicated before it makes more sense.
Most people you'd want to know stuff about later on are too busy to spend much time on 'self recording'. But I'm 100% sure you'll be able to look up what Aunt Gertha ate on the night of the 22nd of October 2017 and whose dog was briefly lost that evening.
Actually, I was thinking of a time when such a thing might become automatic
Remember when your uncle would lecture you on the benefits of keeping an account of where you spent your pocket money? Well, that's now done automatically because of credit cards.
In one of Aldous Huxley's books (island) there is the Minah bird, whose main role in life is to remind people to live 'here and now'. This is the opposite of that. Either you'll end up re-living the past all the time or you will end up not using it.
Either way I don't see the benefit. I'd rather live here and now and eventually forget than to be addicted to my own past, my memory is more than good enough as it is.
The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat people with deficiencies in this area.