By Rhodri MarsdenFollowing on from Tuesday's blog, here's another piece of ongoing Microsoft research of questionable value: MyLifeBits. Scientist Gordon Bell is in the midst of collecting a lifetime of "articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings".
Having stored all these digitally and achieved a paperless utopia, he's now digitally capturing all his phone calls, emails, instant messages, all the television he's watched and radio he's listened to.
A whole life, stored on a single hard disk which Bell estimates will eventually fill around 1 terabyte of storage space. (That's £134.99 to you.) But why?
This story about Bell's endeavours tends to crop up in mags and newspapers every couple of years, mainly because he's perpetually involved in it, and our attitude towards it inevitably changes as technology develops.
Certainly, when he began the project, the notion of being able to archive a lifetime of human experience on a computer disk must have seemed intriguing. It was very prescient; what with the advent of blogs and videologs, people are happily filling up servers worldwide with the details of their often mundane existences for current and future generations to study.
While I'm curiously drawn to some of these purely because of their tedium – a chap called Steve Sutton's is definitely a guilty pleasure – I also wake up every day wracked with fear of the sheer media overload. I'm oppressed by it – the number of unwatched DVDs on my shelves, the number of unread books and web articles, the number of bands recommended to me by people saying "you should really give them a listen". I feel as if I've reached my limit – and while I do admit to irregularly keeping a personal blog, the idea of contributing to this exponentially expanding heap of memories, thoughts and desires just makes me feel a bit unwell.
Because who is it all for? Mementos and keepsakes are lovely things to hang on to, but will your children really want to browse through a terabyte of information to find out what films you watched in October 2007?
When you're in your old age, and a younger relative asks you what it was like to hear the news from the USA on September 11, 2001, wouldn't it be more interesting for them to hear you remenisce and recall what you were doing that day and how it made you feel, rather than going to a laptop and burning them a DVD?
And what about the time lost actually constructing this archive – not to mention the inevitable nostalgia of trawling back through it and reliving, in almost too vivid detail, all your teenage misery?
Sorry. Maybe I get worked up about this because, by nature, I'm a chucker rather than a hoarder. I've certainly got no beef with anyone who chooses to record their every waking moment in the hope that someone in the future will be vaguely interested.
I suppose I'm just confused as to why, when the blogosphere is expanding at a terrifying rate, that this one person's efforts are deemed to be worthy of a research project. Give it up, Gordon. Set yourself free.
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The idea itself is nothing new, actually. Andy Worhole did "timecapsules" if I am not mistaken. I guess that it's not the actual date that is interesting, but the stories behind the events. The stories may vary and span through significant spells of time, they do not excatly coincide with "physical", real time events. Memories are wonderful when they have emotions attached to them, some events tend to be romantisied some may be seen in a new light as time goes by. What I would opt for is a collection of stories that give flavour of time and shed some light on personal progress of an individual. I guess chronology is of a very limited interest, while stories may preserve the unique type of thinking typical of an individual & give a vluable insight into any "spell" of time.
Posted by: Anastasia Vinogradskaya | Saturday, 12 April 2008 at 09:14 PM
delete is the new save
Posted by: mr useless | Sunday, 13 April 2008 at 09:23 AM