Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [9]
In Norman’s vision, this device would be issued very early in life, perhaps at age two or three, and dressed up in the guise of a toddler-friendly toy. Because the devices would be in the hands of young children, the first life recorder would be soft and cuddly, like a plush bear—hence the name Teddy. The Teddy needn’t be limited to just the passive recording of a child’s actions and words. It could be designed to be interactive, and help him or her learn to read, write, draw, and sing.
By starting so young, the Teddy would end up storing a great deal of your life experience. You would become quite intimate with your Teddy. It would “know” all about you and could answer questions about your past. At the same time, it could give you access to knowledge and information from the Internet and other sources. When you outgrew your stuffed-animal phase, your Teddy would change form to match your growing sophistication and interests. Its guise would change, but its complete record of your personal experiences and knowledge would always follow you.
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT
The Teddy is science fiction, but just barely. Total Recall is coming, and young children might be one of the first segments of society to have it applied to them. Many parents won’t be able to resist. Today’s children are already extensively surveilled. They are monitored by microphone while they sleep. They are relentlessly photographed and videoed by camera-happy grown-ups. Some are even fitted with directional radio or GPS tracking devices while out and about. Some preschools provide live Web cameras so parents can look in on the kids’ activities from work. Some parents buy “nanny cams,” which allow them to spy on their children’s caretakers and other domestic help. (Superficially echoing Norman, nanny cams can be bought in the guise of teddy bears.) Older kids are given cell phones so that they, unlike every previous generation, never have any excuse for being unreachable or untraceable for longer than the time it takes to drive through a tunnel.
Parents do all this for two reasons: for their children’s safety (or perceived safety), and to create a trove of memories of what they were like at each fleeting stage of development. The new wave of cheap and unobtrusive recording devices extends parents’ already widely exercised ability to monitor and record their precious charges. Given today’s ethos of “hyperparenting,” it’s hard to imagine the trend stalling or reversing anytime soon. For all these reasons, we can expect one of the vanguards of lifelogging to be children. These are the same future citizens who will be the most enthusiastic and least conflicted about embracing the technology of Total Recall.
But we don’t have to wait for the current crop of toddlers to grow up to see if this prediction will come true. The current crop of young adults is itself a convincing case for the inevitability of Total Recall as common practice.
The Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are the cohort of Americans born approximately between 1982 and 2001. They came of age with Google, cell-phone cameras, file sharing, text messaging, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, and Twitter (the online-community service where friends and families post frequent, 140-words-or-less “microblog” entries about whatever they happen to be doing or thinking at that moment). A few formed software companies and became millionaires in their twenties.
The seventy-million-plus Millennials are adept at multitasking. They listen to music, do homework, watch TV, and send instant messages—simultaneously. Nearly all own cell phones and computers. They snap pictures wherever they go. They socialize quite a lot online,