Soon we’ll be able to remember every second of our lives. But how will we make sense of it?
Research projects like Microsoft’s SenseCam and, most importantly, the huge increases in the affordability, portability, and storage capacity of electronic devices, are driving us closer to a form of ‘perfectly recalled life’ in which everything we see, hear, and read will be saved and available for us at any time. After cellphones have made the memorization of phone numbers an almost obsolete minor art, equally ubiquitous but enormously more powerful gadgets might do the same for most forms of autobiographical memory.
But although most proposed uses for this capability describe people attempting to remember what they saw or did at an specific moment in the past, this isn’t the most important use we have for our memory. Just like most people search the Internet for summaries and opinions instead of raw data, our memory is less an activity log than a essay we keep rewriting. “What I saw last Saturday at 3 pm” is much less important to us than “times I had fun in the park with my children,” or “the last time I felt this angry, and why.” Countless hours of raw unedited video can only take us as far as Borges’ character Funes the Memorious, whose perfect memory let him recall everything, but whose poor synthetic abilities prevented him from turning all that information into knowledge.
The Internet, the current state of the art when it comes to usefully handling massive amounts of information, offers two models to deal with it: search engines like Google, and collaborative editing and filtering communities like Wikipedia. But search engine technology is still very far from being able to understand our experiences in a way that would let it complement our memory of our own lives. It would be useful for, for example, letting us recall word for word our last conversation with a friend, but not to give us the gist of it. On the other hand, a ‘Wikipedia of your Life’ raises an untold number of privacy issues and, perhaps even worse, it doesn’t work at that scale: Wikipedia works because even relatively obscure topics have enough people interested on them to write and maintain their articles, but the huge amount of work necessary to ‘edit’ even a single individual’s electronic memories means that only those with particularly interesting or significant lives would get enough help from the online crowds.
Yet the obvious gains of eased access to and insight about your own past suggest that some people might well be interested in paying for the service. After all, psychologists often assist in this way, by helping us analyze and make sense of the patterns in our past and present. What new ways of looking at ourselves might be gained with the help of a psychologist/biographer/video editor able to work with us to extract new meanings from our experiences? A collection of beautiful sights could make you fall in love with a city you thought you didn’t like, or a compilation of daily complications might question your decision to remain in a job that stresses you too much.
Such an activity would, like all biographies (but with unprecedented sources of information), mix data analysis, psychology, and art, and thus raise the question of how much would the biographer influence your own reconstructed memory of events. Management consultants have written about the unexpected power in the hands of those in charge of writing the minutes of a meeting; the way even a recent event is summarized can deeply influence its future impact. If you give someone — a person or a program — access to the mass of your electronic memories and ask a question, how much of that someone will be put in the answer? (In what subtle ways are the technical characteristics of Google, the community customs of Wikipedia, and the details of how blogs work influencing the substantive content of the answers we find in the Internet?)
And to go back to the Wikipedia model, once your memories are electronic, why restrict yourself to recall only the things you’ve seen? ‘Desktop extensions’ for search engines let you look for information in both your own computer and the wider Internet with equal ease, and from the point of view of the user, it often makes no difference at all where the information resides, and whether it’s something that you knew before or not. As we increasingly remember things not only with our brains but also with our machines, the specific boundaries of individual memory, and hence of personal identity, might come to be redefined.
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