Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (17 page)

But it is not just students who will supercharge their learning using Total Recall. It is a given today that we all need to be lifelong learners. In fact, many educators insist that just cramming a student’s head full of knowledge is not the point; that the goal should be to educate the students to be better learners, brainstormers, and better collaborators. I know that in my own field of computer science, unless one is constantly learning, one’s knowledge will quickly become obsolete. Learning may well be the key to the greatest economic rewards of this new technological era.

Imagine Dan, a blueberry farmer. The summer has been very wet, and he consults his e-memories to recall how he dealt with a similar wet season eight years ago. His farm has its own e-memory, which Dan data-mines to understand which varieties of blueberry have been most profitable. Dan is interested in organic farming and has built up his own e-library of Internet articles, recordings of farm visits by a government consultant, and a few talks at the local university. He loves to sit down with his e-memories and a cup of tea to contemplate how he might make his farm better.

Ken is a volunteer hockey coach. He has several e-books on coaching, Internet articles, and notes and recordings from a number of coaching clinics he has attended. He often watches other teams practice and picks the brains of other coaches to discover new drills and approaches. Ken’s view of the game borrows from many sources but is unique to him. He loves to mull over his notes and diagrams, to look at video clip examples of certain plays, and then present his insights to his players in a multimedia “chalk talk.” Ken loves learning the game and will never stop comparing approaches, connecting dots, and gathering examples.

I could go on multiplying such examples: the mother of a dyslexic child, ever learning about how to better prepare him for the world, the layperson with a deep religious interest, and the countless jobs that deal with rapidly changing information, from lawyers tracking evolving case law to contractors dealing with building codes. Lifelong learning is both a necessity and a joy.

What I find fascinating is that once our learning is self-directed, without any education system telling us what to do, we all act like little professors, just like the scientist that Bush had in mind. We gather material, arrange it, create links, add notes, and generally make sense of it all. We call up bits of it to help put together our next idea.

Arranging one’s material is very important. A Total Recall system ought to let you organize, classify, or taxonomize the material you are taking in. I believe there is a very strong case to be made that you don’t really have a grasp of your material until you have built a mental model, a structure, such as a taxonomy or mind-map, under which you classify the information being absorbed. A good e-memory will help you arrange material this way for retrieval by classification, and will help you visualize your classification and modify it as your understanding evolves.

A good e-memory lets you step back from information hunting, out in the wilds of the Web, to do some understanding farming back on your home turf. If the Web gets us through the research phase more quickly, if e-memories help us refind and organize our knowledge more quickly, then what do we have more time for? Reflection. Anyone wanting to learn and understand will be doing more pondering, more reflecting, more searching for clues and connections to understanding. Vannevar Bush’s imagined memex scientist “ponders over his notes in the evening.” So will farmer Dan, coach Ken, and countless others.

Just as the World Wide Web enabled an era of increased research, Total Recall will enable an era of increased reflection.

CHAPTER 7

EVERYDAY LIFE—AND AFTERLIFE

I have a hand-loomed blanket from the late 1800s, handed down from my grandmother Bell. Grandma had seven boys and three girls who, in turn, produced twenty-five grandchildren, including me. The only remaining mementos of her are half a dozen photos, a Bible, a dresser, and the blanket. As the older generation passed away, the Bible was passed on to the remaining eldest son, and eventually on to the grandsons. At each transition, there was inevitably a heated dispute over who ought to inherit the Bible, although none of the clan was especially religious. When it was my turn for the Bible, I declined, but I happily accepted the virtually unknown blanket, which was surreptitiously given to me by a favorite aunt who had been caring for Grandma.

This beautiful blanket, now used as a wall hanging, is one of the few physical artifacts that I care for, but I will soon pass it on to my son. For me, a high-resolution photo will suffice. If I’m feeling sentimental, I’ll print a life-sized copy. How can I be satisfied with a digital photo? Wouldn’t I take far more pleasure in the actual, tangible blanket? Nothing is quite like the blanket itself, but I have lots of mementos and memories, and taken as a whole, I’ve discovered that I derive more pleasure from them in digital form. While I am enjoying my e-memories, most people’s physical mementos gather dust in an attic—if they even have them.

A typical story of the distribution of physical items after a dear one’s passing goes like this: “I spent a day being careful to preserve and bundle my mother’s artifacts (mostly correspondence and scrapbooks) for my sister. After a day my filter became very narrow and all the stuff just went to the dump. And my sister never came to claim what I had saved.”

Physical family heirlooms and mementos pass down through random branches of the family, eventually arriving where they are unrecognized, unappreciated, and discarded. Other relatives, who might have been keenly interested in the mementos, are unlikely to even know of their existence. At best, only one person has custody of the valued heirloom, which requires physical space and careful preservation if it is to be passed on to the next generation.

How refreshing to contrast this to a digital legacy! All of the heirs can have a copy, it can be quite expansive, and in the event you don’t especially want to know anything about the departed, there is no cost to your space or attention.

Of course, a family heirloom may be some rare antique or a diamond bracelet. Objects with monetary value will be squabbled over until the end of time. But I am speaking here of emotional value. Not long ago, Jim Gemmell overheard a woman speaking to her friend:

I’m going to give you my cell phone number . . . you can’t leave messages on my home phone because I’ve saved too many messages from my grandson.

This lady wasn’t just keeping track of when her grandson had called or maintaining an accurate record of the words he said. For her, hearing his little voice was precious.

This is a very different aspect of Total Recall from what we have discussed in the last three chapters. This kind of memory gets to the heart of your emotional life, to the fabric and climax of the best stories you can tell about yourself. Sure, we can have perfect recall with regard to our work, our health, our pursuit of knowledge; we will improve our minds, bodies, and ventures. But this also touches our hearts, our emotional lives, with all that impractical stuff that makes up the rest of our days and nights. It is an awesome prospect that even these kinds of memories can become e-memories, totally searchable, even ready for scientific analysis. What would Proust have made of it?

These kinds of memories so often exist between you and someone you are close to. Between you and your grandmother, son, friend. They are often family memories. As such, the bio-memories overlap. Each individual’s enhances the others’. In the world of Total Recall, your e-memories will supercharge this enhancement. Your personal relationships inside and around your family will be transformed.

If we can have a complete record of the things about people that especially provoke meaning for us, what will we do with this complete record when they are gone? We will maintain the e-memory of that person as a treasured heirloom. And, someday, we will ask it questions. The e-memory will answer. You will have virtual immortality.

RECORDING AND STORYTELLING

Lifelogging implies collecting countless digital artifacts—and increasing the variety of artifacts is all to the good. We want all the strands of the fabric of our life. Vacation videos. Snowy dioramas from that skiing trip. Our first blanket (or our grandmother’s). Songs we wrote in high school. Birthday cards. Tickets to concerts. What your father said in that crucial moment of the third quarter in that crucial game. Maps of our travels. Recipes. Laundry lists. Lists of guests invited to a party. Toasts, eulogies, and your baby’s first attempts at speech. The fabric of your personal, intimate life.

These e-memories are so enjoyable when they come up on screensavers that I declared screensavers the “killer application” for e-memories (ahead of search, which so many people presume is the chief end of Total Recall). The MyLifeBits screensaver shows photos and also selects random ten-second video clips out of longer videos. Before Total Recall, years would have passed between those occasions when I bothered pulling out old videotapes to play selections from them; now I can enjoy clips from them daily.

Screensavers are pleasurable on my desktop PC and notebook, but they really shine on my big plasma screen. I am tracking the progress of organic light-emitting polymer technology and looking forward to the day that an entire wall can be a screen. I want to sit at my dining room table and have my wall transport me to some other place or cherished past event—perhaps I can feel like I am reliving a train ride through the Rockies or sailing on the San Francisco Bay. I also love little “picture frame” screens that can sit on an end table and, instead of being stuck on one photo as real picture frames are, root through my e-memories to show all kinds of things.

Having different types of artifacts contributes to the richness of your e-memories. Think of the lady I mentioned above with her phone messages from her grandson. Jim Gemmell has some treasured audio recordings of his grandfather’s Scottish brogue. Video is essential for “preserving people,” a view that I have only recently come to appreciate. Seeing someone move, speak, and make facial expressions provides a distinctive view of a personality that written records and photos can rarely touch. Now add location, temperature, heart rate, and other new values we will be sensing, and really fascinating perspectives are formed.

With location tracking, we can plot you in space as well as time—and that’s exactly what we did with the MyLifeBits Trip Replay program. Gemmell came back to work one Monday, after spending the weekend at a sports tournament with his son, traveling with a GPS and taking pictures with his digital camera. When he joined us in the office, we were able see on a map everywhere he had been, and where his photos had been taken. Trip Replay even animated his travels, showing him moving around on a map, with photos flipping up as they occurred.

Gemmell was excited. “Look at this!” he exclaimed. “And think about it: I have the information about each game my son played in my calendar. All the components are here to tell the story of my weekend without me doing any work at all!” We started brainstorming about how this could be automatically wrapped up in an attractive form and sent to his parents to fill them in on their grandson’s weekend. We later hired an intern to prototype a system that let you just select a time range, exclude a few duds or embarrassing moments, and then click “Blog it.”

Consequently, I’m bullish on automatic travelogues. I envision a service that takes your itinerary and produces a trip log with photos of where you stayed, sights that you passed by, meals eaten, et cetera. With the use of GPS, the entire trip can be created in great detail that might even exceed the actual trip experience. As I write, Telestial is preparing to roll out a service that will track where your cell phone is, and post stock photos of the locations you visit to a Web site you designate. You can add captions by sending SMS text messages from your phone. This is just an early (and very simple) entry in a coming wave of automatic travelogue offerings.

The landscape of our e-memories becomes lush as we share with one another. The value of pooling media is already evident in photo- and video-sharing Web sites, like Flickr and YouTube. Facebook shows us how much we enjoy having others’ comments on our photos. Think of an extended family gathering for Grandma’s birthday with a number of people taking photos and maybe shooting a little video. Once the media is shared, if there is even one keener in the family who adds comments, flags key moments, or groups the media in some way, then we all benefit.

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.