Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [58]
A typical story of the distribution of physical items after a dear one’s passing goes like this: “I spent a day being careful to preserve and bundle my mother’s artifacts (mostly correspondence and scrapbooks) for my sister. After a day my filter became very narrow and all the stuff just went to the dump. And my sister never came to claim what I had saved.”
Physical family heirlooms and mementos pass down through random branches of the family, eventually arriving where they are unrecognized, unappreciated, and discarded. Other relatives, who might have been keenly interested in the mementos, are unlikely to even know of their existence. At best, only one person has custody of the valued heirloom, which requires physical space and careful preservation if it is to be passed on to the next generation.
How refreshing to contrast this to a digital legacy! All of the heirs can have a copy, it can be quite expansive, and in the event you don’t especially want to know anything about the departed, there is no cost to your space or attention.
Of course, a family heirloom may be some rare antique or a diamond bracelet. Objects with monetary value will be squabbled over until the end of time. But I am speaking here of emotional value. Not long ago, Jim Gemmell overheard a woman speaking to her friend:
I’m going to give you my cell phone number . . . you can’t leave messages on my home phone because I’ve saved too many messages from my grandson.
This lady wasn’t just keeping track of when her grandson had called or maintaining an accurate record of the words he said. For her, hearing his little voice was precious.
This is a very different aspect of Total Recall from what we have discussed in the last three chapters. This kind of memory gets to the heart of your emotional life, to the fabric and climax of the best stories you can tell about yourself. Sure, we can have perfect recall with regard to our work, our health, our pursuit of knowledge; we will improve our minds, bodies, and ventures. But this also touches our hearts, our emotional lives, with all that impractical stuff that makes up the rest of our days and nights. It is an awesome prospect that even these kinds of memories can become e-memories, totally searchable, even ready for scientific analysis. What would Proust have made of it?
These kinds of memories so often exist between you and someone you are close to. Between you and your grandmother, son, friend. They are often family memories. As such, the bio-memories overlap. Each individual’s enhances the others’. In the world of Total Recall, your e-memories will supercharge this enhancement. Your personal relationships inside and around your family will be transformed.
If we can have a complete record of the things about people that especially provoke meaning for us, what will we do with this complete record when they are gone? We will maintain the e-memory of that person as a treasured heirloom. And, someday, we will ask it questions. The e-memory will answer. You will have virtual immortality.
RECORDING AND STORYTELLING
Lifelogging implies collecting countless digital artifacts—and increasing the variety of artifacts is all to the good. We want all the strands of the fabric of our life. Vacation videos. Snowy dioramas from that skiing trip. Our first blanket (or our grandmother’s). Songs we wrote in high school. Birthday cards. Tickets to concerts. What your father said in that crucial moment of the third quarter in that crucial game. Maps