Total Recall

There's something terribly sad about bloggers (or maybe it's just the ones I read are a bit melancholic). For others, though, this is the way of the future (there's always been resistance to new forms of communication). One even hears the word 'community' quite amusingly bandied about (yeah, right, whatever) and no doubt there are 'theorists' hard at work analyzing how it all ties in with late capitalism, post-modernity, Foucault or Zizek.

What interests me though is the sheer self-conceitedness of it all (for a little while, anyway. After that the interest wanes). I-am-the centre-of the -world. Please notice me. Confess! (and don't miss out the juicy bits!)

C, in her characteristically lucid way said: it's a bit obscene, having the image of someone up there long after they've passed away.

Start the week:

We may be the first civilisation that doesn't leave a trace of what we thought and felt in any memorable public monuments. Creative destruction and 'instant living.' And yet, paradoxically, it is just this rapid shifting of our background scenery that impels us to collect the fragments of our lives and hold them ever so closely to us. I think this accounts for the conservation movement but also for the vast cathedrals of the minds, the public libraries in Washington, Paris, London ...(see Steiner, 'Errata'). No matter that no one reads 'linearly' any more..as long as it's there. (So think the Eloi). And we'll soon be able to watch everything on Youtube or read everything on google books. Fantastic!

From the archives:

Does anyone actually go back over their previous blogs and think: what was the point of writing that? I have catalogued..er ..what, exactly? The life I didn't live -a bit like the archetypal Japanese tourist who enjoys the experience of watching the video of his trip to Europe more than the actual bloody thing!

New Yorker: Alec Wilkinson:
(you're going to like this, C)

Some people are now running a project so that every detail of their lives is meticulously recorded, scanned, noted, digitalized, taped, and stored. It's called lifelogging. Friends, family, former students and children: avert your eyes now. Done? Good.For fuck's sake!

Open eyes.

Of course, it could be argued that this is just an extreme form of blogging, just as blogging is the accentuated form of a diary. What is this pre-occupation with the authentic self ? A fear of death, of missing out on the lives we never had, of organizing chaos? Maybe it's the desire to weave a thread through the different pieces of our lives and say, at last, here is a coherent story.

Your lifebits could be surfaced, made present as patterns on an ambient display. Or compressed and shaped like a movie so that something emerges from the mess , the enigma, that is a human life. 'Lifebits'? You've gotta laugh.

Horwitz, president-elect of The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence:

I would like to see computers provide a fabric that would extend us in areas where we're weak. If you look at 20th century cognitive psychology what it showed was that people had vast abilities coupled with limitations and bottlenecks. ...[such as] people forgetting things, and being biased in their judgements. To create a computation that understands those grooves and nooks and crannies ..using it in places where a computer can do well in a complementary way to extend people....

It comes to understand how you organize your memories, by what you choose. It learns to become like you, to help you be a better you.

I kid thee not. Computer geeks may be fantastically intelligent in a limited way but there's a reason it's called artificial intelligence!

On hearing the computer fan whizzing late at night Bell (the man running the experiment) says: My system is consolidating new memories. It's like a human being dreaming.

Logging everything means we can go back and analyse our tone in an argument, re-examine our stated life-goals and see if we've met them. Then we can see what went wrong (will certainly save a lot of money on therapy). The pattern of things that happens to us is what we are. That's deep, real deep...more to the point: we should be able to make some money out of it. And like real memory we'll be able to delete those inane memories or events we don't want to recall (like me blogging about this). Forget the Madeleines.

Z. Bauman:

In Borges' story Funes, thrown from his horse, is incapable of Platonic ideas..that is, of abstracting: of putting certain aspects of what he saw in focus by leaving the rest out. Instead he was able (had to!) to perceive every grape that had been pressed into the wine, and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard where you and I, with one quick look, perceive three wine glasses on a table. Two or three times Funes reconstructed an entire day without without once erring or faltering, but each reconstruction itself had taken an entire day. Having found not only the task he had set himself was interminable, but that the whole idea of such a task was pointless, Funes complained: 'My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap'.