John D. Sutter, CNN: My week of recording a 'digital memory

Sutter spent a week in living the life (November 3,2009) of recording everything http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/03/life.recording.sutter/index.html just to test our theory of Total Recall. He started by saying that he was frustrated “when you set out intentionally to create an e-memory of everything, you end up with too much stuff -- and you miss out on living.”  Total Recall is about how you use technology to improve your life and not become a slave to feeding your e-memory or becoming obsessed with image capture (only a minor part of our e-Memory)! His bottom line was:

“I did realize that more memories are worth preserving than I'd thought. I tend to take photos and videos at important events -- vacations, weekend outings, weddings. But some things that seem banal turn out more interesting: What your apartment looks like, the streets you drive on, your cat pushing his water dish into the wall like a hockey puck. Those boring-sounding things -- which you really shouldn't post online and bore other people with -- can be important components of an e-memory. So appreciate what you've got, celebrate the details and record your life if you want to. But, my humble advice after a week of awkwardness and embarrassment, is to do it for the sake of getting more out of living -- not just because you're afraid you'll lose something.”

This week long experiment cooroborates our experience of trying to understand the immediate and long term value storing everything.  He took many more photos, made more diary entries, and recorded more conversations than we do. We automatically capture everything that goes through our computer--especially everyday trivia e.g. bills, official documents, events. This reduces our cognitive load by not having to remember a lot of details. This in turn, lets us gets “more out of living”.

Comments

[memory]

Your theory of total recall is very interesting.