I was thinking last night about how, with the right application, it would be really easy to pull together a pretty complete digital snapshot of my life on any given day, particularly in the last seven or eight years.
The app would need to grab all o f my sent e-mail for the date, as well as blog entries written, the Ping for the day (if I wrote it), my sent e-mail from work, chat logs saved by Trillian, digital photos taken that day, and possibly something from my infrequently-written-in-journal. Browser history might factor in there, too, but would be largely unhelpful (“I visited the Ping how many times that day?) and hard to track since I periodically flush my browser history.
I tend to remember things based on when they happened, so chronologically-ordered information is the most helpful to me. While I’m not sure how frequently one would really need such a complete view, it still might be nice to have everything searchable in one place.
Posted in Technology
COD April 19, 2007, 4:05 pm
I think our brains bury a lot of memories for a reason – mostly because they are worthless, or sometimes because they are painful. I don’t want a way to pull it all back on demand. Seems sort of creepy to me.
Paul April 19, 2007, 4:27 pm
Creepy, but it could also be neat. Yesterday on NPR I learned that our brains essentially sweep out all of the day’s “useless” knowledge (what clothes your coworkers wore, what color the car in front of you in traffic was, et al) during sleep. Ultimately I’m sure there’ll be a device that piggybacks on that “garbage collection” and starts to form a real picture of your day.
Or, it could just end up like “Defending Your Life” and be pure Albert Brooks entertainment.