Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [60]
Imagine the parents of players on a basketball team. Suppose the video of the game is posted to a Web site, keyed with the score clock, allowing everyone to quickly jump to a certain point in the game and skip breaks or dull parts. After the game, each family goes online and flags a few favorite plays made by their child. When all their annotations are added together, an automatic highlight reel is easily produced. Years later, a player can go back to the copy of the game in his e-memory and relive his big moments. I believe that many sports venues in the future will install cameras and post video automatically. They’ll make some extra money, and as we share our thoughts on the sport with one another, some splendid e-memories will be constructed.
Furthermore, sharing is necessary to fill in a key missing part of any e-memory. If I wear a camera capturing my own point of view, there is always one person left out of the footage—me! You and I must share our point-of-view footage with each other in order to appear in our own lifelogs.
One thing we will certainly share with each other is stories. Humans are storytellers, and no matter how much I value a recording, I’ll always love to hear someone else tell the story of the event.
In 1989, when my ninety-year-old mother visited me, I asked her to write some stories to pass on to her four grandchildren. In particular, I asked her to tell stories of the changes she had witnessed since her birth in 1899. She wrote about social life, clubs, church, and school. She told stories of Christmas, Thanksgiving, farming, gardening, and food from butchering to canning. Just recently, my sister thanked me for initiating these stories, as she was reading them to her own grandchildren.
Jim Gemmell was thinking about stories in 2005 when he asked me to spend a number of lunch breaks with the half-dozen others in the lab answering questions about my experience at Digital Equipment Corporation. We ended up with an hour of video stories and opinions never expressed elsewhere. I’m sure the viewer would get a different sense of me from seeing these videos than he would by reading what I have written about life at that time.
I believe oral histories are irreplaceable. While I love all the artifacts at the Computer History Museum, I’ve come to see the stories they collect in oral histories and public talks as the most important thing the museum does. Of course, memories fade over time, so for accuracy we want more than just oral histories. Still, inaccuracies and all, I want to capture people recounting stories.
For Total Recall to fulfill its full potential, people must be able to tell stories anytime, anyplace, any way they feel like it. This could be by sitting in front of video camera each night for a dear-diary entry, talking about some episode while driving, or typing in some thoughts about a recorded event.
AUTOMATIC SUMMARIZATION
With today’s technology, your e-memories would be a mixed blessing for your heirs. They would have the benefit of more knowledge about you, but it would come to them as an enormous, daunting mess. Your heirs may enjoy looking at random photos, or searching for e-mails containing the names of presidents in order to read some of your political perspectives, but they will likely miss the most important and interesting bits, and may be too intimidated to spend much time with your e-memories.
I felt this way about my own early scanned collection, and it was my frustrated eruption of “It’s just bits!” that galvanized Jim Gemmell into action and got us started on MyLifeBits. Thankfully, our prototyping work has assured me that things will get much better.
We will see the evolution of software that will reduce the chores involved in making one’s life bits worthwhile to others. It will help to develop tools to make storytelling and human arrangement easier.