When I first read about Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project (warning: annoying animation on the front page), I was more than a little torqued.
MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.
The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.
And when I read an article by Bell and Jim Gemmell in the current Scientific American, I got spun up again (warning: Sci Am links rot quickly). Come on, already: the digitialization of “everything”? How reductionist, how naive.
Bell seems to think that only those items that are convenient to archive are worth archiving. That is, word-oriented documents, and a scanty bit of audio and video. There’s a look-Mom calculation that demonstrates that 60 years worth of accumulation can fit comfortably in a terabyte of storage, and yet this calculation doesn’t provide for any storage of feature-length movies, and for only one MP3 per day.
Bell doesn’t just short-change the other senses, he ignores them entirely. He’s not interested in capturing the smell of just-baked chocolate chip cookies, or of the artificial fog from a Rosco machine, or of an ailanthus tree. He’s not interested in capturing the feel of your cat’s fur, or pine bark, or a hot shower after a morning’s exercise. He’s not interested in capturing the taste of wedding cake, or of a good zinfandel recommended by your cousin from California, or of blood, sweat, or tears.
And for those of us seeking to emulate Bell, it helps to retain a personal assistant; in Bell’s case, the digitizing of past records was accomplished by “several years” of work by hired help.
The Bell and Gemmell article brushes off privacy and security issues with some hand-waving. And yet… and yet… when I read Emily Nussbaum’s story (via Arts & Letters Daily) about the embrace by the under-30 crowd of all things social online, about the “let it all hang out” attitude of high-schoolers, I begin to wonder whether Bell isn’t a visionary just a little ahead of his time. From the Nussbaum piece:
THEY HAVE ARCHIVED THEIR ADOLESCENCE
I remember very little from junior-high school and high school, and I’ve always believed that was probably a good thing. Caitlin Oppermann, 17, has spent her adolescence making sure this doesn’t happen to her. At 12, she was blogging; at 14, she was snapping digital photos; at 15, she edited a documentary about her school marching band. But right now the high-school senior is most excited about her first “serious project,” caitlinoppermann.com. On it, she lists her e-mail and AIM accounts, complains about the school’s Web censors, and links to photos and videos. There’s nothing racy, but it’s the type of information overload that tends to terrify parents. Oppermann’s are supportive: “They know me and they know I’m not careless with the power I have on the Internet.”
As we talk, I peer into Oppermann’s bedroom. I’m at a café in the West Village, and Oppermann is in Kansas City—just like those Ugg girls, who might, for all I know, be linked to her somehow. And as we talk via iChat, her face floats in the corner of my screen, blonde and deadpan. By swiveling her Webcam, she gives me a tour: her walls, each painted a different color of pink; storage lockers; a subway map from last summer, when she came to Manhattan for a Parsons design fellowship. On one wall, I recognize a peace banner I’ve seen in one of her videos.
I ask her about that Xanga, the blog she kept when she was 12. Did she delete it?
“It’s still out there!” she says. “Xanga, a Blogger, a Facebook, my Flickr account, my Vimeo account. Basically, what I do is sign up for everything. I kind of weed out what I like.”
Maybe it’s true, maybe each one of us is nothing more than a list of our favorite movies and a blogroll. Jeez, I hope not.