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If you could record your life...
electricitylikesme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
...how much of it would you?
Now I think this is a more complicated question then it seems at first glance, because when I say record I'm not referring to a big brother style "camera following you around" idea. Perhaps far from it. What I am referring to is personal information you keep about yourself - on my computer I have a lot of photos, every bit of literature I've ever written on PC (more or less), my entire music collection (more then 3/4's I probably never listen to). In a word - a lot of information or media content which I feel defines who I am in varying amounts.
Across the internet, if I vanity search, I can actually find usenet posts I made back when I was about 12. I can search my entire forum history here. See my views change and evolve with time and interaction.
This is probably but a fraction of the deluge which is my digital fingerprint on the world and yet I find myself thinking: is this enough? The older I get the less I delete. "My Documents" grows and moves from PC to PC and more recently I've started getting a bit more paranoid about backing it up.
It is perhaps fortunate that data storage is getting cheaper because between camera phones and social networking the amount of information we're all keeping about ourselves, to me, seems to be getting ever larger and we're accepting ever less loss of fidelity about it.
And so, my stimulus question for this thread is: given how much of our lives we try to store already, where would you draw the line? If you could record everything - feed your synapses into a mainframe and have permanent recollection of every moment you ever lived - would you? And if not, where for you is the line comfortable. What do you need or feel is important in order to be able to know yourself, see how you've changed? How big would the hard drive which holds your life need to be?
tl;dr See the last paragraph just above.
Now I think this is a more complicated question then it seems at first glance, because when I say record I'm not referring to a big brother style "camera following you around" idea. Perhaps far from it. What I am referring to is personal information you keep about yourself - on my computer I have a lot of photos, every bit of literature I've ever written on PC (more or less), my entire music collection (more then 3/4's I probably never listen to). In a word - a lot of information or media content which I feel defines who I am in varying amounts.
Across the internet, if I vanity search, I can actually find usenet posts I made back when I was about 12. I can search my entire forum history here. See my views change and evolve with time and interaction.
This is probably but a fraction of the deluge which is my digital fingerprint on the world and yet I find myself thinking: is this enough? The older I get the less I delete. "My Documents" grows and moves from PC to PC and more recently I've started getting a bit more paranoid about backing it up.
It is perhaps fortunate that data storage is getting cheaper because between camera phones and social networking the amount of information we're all keeping about ourselves, to me, seems to be getting ever larger and we're accepting ever less loss of fidelity about it.
And so, my stimulus question for this thread is: given how much of our lives we try to store already, where would you draw the line? If you could record everything - feed your synapses into a mainframe and have permanent recollection of every moment you ever lived - would you? And if not, where for you is the line comfortable. What do you need or feel is important in order to be able to know yourself, see how you've changed? How big would the hard drive which holds your life need to be?
tl;dr See the last paragraph just above.
electricitylikesme on
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I mean, you never know when it might come in handy. Often I'm trying to tell a story, but i forgot some details, wouldn't it be useful to just dig up the file and read up on it again? But it's usually not something I'd want to be confronted with again. Fuck, I've been trying to stop think about a lot of stupid shit I did. Last thing I want would be to have that pop up on a random tracklist or something.
I wouldn't care if everything were recorded as the person I was once is not at all the person I am now. But...other people don't think that way and absolutely judge you based on your past. For that reason, the idea of having my entire life searchable and thus analyzable to such a degree kind of frightens me.
The OP has nothing on selling your memories or whatever.
In a hypothetical sense, if there was 100% security with a literal, absolute 0% chance of leakage, then my answer is an unequivocal yes.
Unfortunately, even if it were possible to record my life in such a way, such security is impossible. I would love to have access to what I've seen, felt, and experienced with perfect clarity and recollection. I would not at all want anyone else to have access to that, even mundane things.
Only until I did it.
In other words, I would record nothing.
I do dwell upon the embarrassing and or stupid things I did in my past.
Any record I would want would end when I started to talk.
I could see this being extremely practical, if the search algorithms get effective enough. Just look up anything you don't remember, and it's all there. Even aside from nostalgic purposes, the potential uses are really staggering.
I think I'd want it, though I'd want to make sure privacy and security were maintained. And that the records could be destroyed if privacy/security ever were breached.
word.
And whoever said they would record firsts, firsts are overrated.
but they're listening to every word I say
If I understand this right, recording your life is like The Truman Show except only you can view your own footage. If it's perfect playback and you don't get to edit the parts you don't like, wouldn't that make one feel like God/the panopticon/Big Brother is always watching? You might second guess yourself a lot more if you believed a perfect fidelity was on record, even if you alone were the audience. It'd change your whole social personality to be aware eyes are on you all the time - you are your own toughest critic, right?
I think the potential audience is a very significant factor in how this affects your personality. I don't agree that if you are the sole audience for these recordings it would have a significant impact on the social psychology of many, maybe most people. Some would dwell on it, or use it as a crutch, or get lost in the past, or go monkeying around like a voyeur, or whatever, but I think most people would just keep their memories filed away the same way they do now. I may not have total recall right now but I have a pretty good memory. I don't sit here accessing all of it all the time. I don't think the promise of perfect clarity would lure me to do so, either.
The brain already records the past, in a way. This is merely a discussion on whether or not we'd want a more thorough, better detailed, and more easily-accessible record.
But you're right. It is "quite self-centered" as are a majority of the actions human beings partake in. So what?
Well that introduces an interesting notion of "the past." Your brian doesn't record the "past." Your brain recalls past presents through the present. The manner of transcription as told by ELM in the OP sounds to be quite different from this -- you yourself are actually recorded and stored as a veritable simulacrum.
What happens to all this footage after you die, anyways? It'd be a shame to delete a lifetime of footage so can you leave it to someone in a will or stuff it into a time capsule?
I’ve been on both sides of this. For a few years I saved only creative work and school projects, destroying any chatlogs and e-mails as soon as possible. At some point (last year, I think) I switched over, trying to save everything I could in order to have a central life reference to counterbalance my somewhat poor memory recall. This quickly proved unsustainable, because I’m too busy creating information to appropriately label and sort said information. This problem could, of course, be reduced if I had greater technical skill, but there’s only so much that can be done.
My current approach is to save things I think might be useful—e-mail, chatlogs, bookmarks, images—in a loosely organised manner, and just rely on the Internet for the rest.
That is to say, who knows.
In general, I’d say that if you want it available after death, put it on the Web in a way that will hopefully stay accessible; otherwise it’s a loss. Most of what people save wouldn’t be of any real use to other people anyhow.
I don't really see much good in recording my weekend jaunts into piles of horse manure.
I still have one log someone made online that I wish I could delete simply because I don't want to have to explain it if anyone ever finds it. :P
Link?
My footage would be disseminated to the entire world and would magically cure all diseases. It would have to be cut by Scorsese, though. At least, that's what my will would suggest.
Essentially, you write an email to yourself, and you select the date you want it to be sent. It can be anywhere from 1 day, to a year, to 30 years. Whatever.
I received my one year old email from myself about two weeks ago. Over the course of 12 months, I completely forgot about the website and email. Needless to say, I was completely shocked and surprised, but it was incredible for me to completely forget about the email and then read it a year later.
Now, I use the website to write an email to myself once a year, to be sent a year later. I will keep these archived and have a folder for them. I try to fill the email with details about what exactly I am feeling and experiencing - things I might forget.
This is really cool.
I'd only want my memories recorded for the purpose of feeding them into a clone of mine after this body dies.
I go to great lengths to habitually destroy any and all physical evidence of my past. I wouldn't want there to be a concrete record of it, not for any reason, and not even of the 'best' parts.
As a general rule I've manged to keep pretty much every single paper I ever wrote since high school. Suffice it to say whenever I bother to read some of them I'm struck by how much of an idiotic jackass I was when I was younger. And when I read my old college papers I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about anymore.