Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [68]
It will be interesting to see how society adapts to e-memories in the workplace. Surely there will be an evolution of law and employment contracts—which, in day-to-day practice, people may pay as little attention to as they do to posted speed limits. How many of the millions who will legally commit to delete e-memories will actually do so, given no possible way for anyone to ever verify if they really did it? Contracts may stipulate nonretention of e-memories, but any teeth in such agreements will be regarding disclosure, not retention.
I can’t imagine maintaining separate computers for work and personal memories. Even having separate e-mail accounts for all the different organizations that might want me to purge certain memories would be ridiculous. I have a separate personal e-mail account, but I receive personal e-mails on my work account and work-related e-mails on my personal account. My calendar is an intermixing of work and personal life.
My data is entangled.
I try to organize everything I have to separate work memories from personal ones, but it’s tough. I know I will end up with information on the work side that really is part of my personal story—for example, hotel and airline arrangements for my business travel. Likewise, I no doubt have recorded chat sessions with Jim Gemmell that include a few lines about, say, company reorganization in the middle of stories of our daily lives.
If I care most about leaving my story to posterity, I’ll err on the side of marking things personal. If I care most about not ending up in a lawsuit, I’ll err on the side of calling items work-related. I can’t think of how to make things better, apart from improved tools for marking items as work or personal. Maybe that’s a bug we can fix. Maybe that’s just reality we must adapt to.
ADAPTING TO MORE SELF-KNOWLEDGE
One change we will have to adapt to is having vastly more knowledge about ourselves. I’ve already covered how this self-knowledge will improve such things as health. But some people have shared with me a worry that they may learn things about themselves that they don’t really want to know—the depressing truth may get out. They go further than the Soviets, who erased what they didn’t like from their history; these folk would erase everything just in case there might be something they don’t like.
They ask: Do we really want to know all this stuff? Liam Bannon, writing in favor of forgetting, offers up the inarguable: “More data do not imply better-quality decisions.” Of course that’s true—but flawed human memories do not imply quality decisions either.
There are many instances where you need more data to get a better picture of things. One example would be tracking your heartbeat for an entire month so as to not miss a few key events. For people reviewing performance or progress, an accurate record can make all the difference over a fuzzy and rationalized memory.
In the world of business, we do not hear arguments against record keeping or concerns that facing the truth is inferior to a comfortably dimmed memory. Accountants do not spend their lunch breaks debating the need to forget or whether storing every single transaction might clutter the record too much. To the contrary, it has become established business practice to write down clear and measurable goals, to measure your performance, and then to look back at your performance compared to your predictions to see how you did.
In sports, athletes carefully record their batting average, save percentage, race time, or whatever measure applies to them. They don’t rely on their memory of how they tend to play toward the end of games; their fourth-quarter statistics are compared to other quarters. Even in youth sports, elaborate statistics are