The Brian Manley

I forget stuff. For example, I forget that this blog is here and that I should post something once in awhile. But I also forget important things; did I take my medicine? What did I eat yesterday before my headache started? How many cigarettes did I smoke today? Have I paid the mortgage this month? Who’s this person in this picture? What did I accomplish at work this week? You get the idea…

Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame) didn’t seem to have this problem. He simply wrote down or filed away everything into a giant compendium of his life which he called the Dymaxion Chronofile. “Dymaxion”, because he seemed to give everything that name. And “Chronofile”, because the files were created and kept in chronological order. Get it?  Anyway, every fifteen minutes Bucky would note in a journal what he was doing or feeling or did or was about to do. His was probably the most documented life ever lived. If stacked, the pages would be 270 feet tall.

Vannevar Bush proposed a machine, the “memex”, so solve this sort of problem for people like me (and you). Writing for the Atlantic in 1945, his article “As We May Think” proposed a wonder-desk that would store, catalog, classify and retrieve all the information that we generated or acquired as part of our day to day lives. This would be done “simply by the clever use of relay circuits”. Uh, right. Not in 1945 you ain’t.

Gordon Bell (of VAX fame) at Microsoft Research picked up on these ideas several years ago and decided to take a stab at documenting his life also. Box by box, he began scanning documents and photos, creating complicated directory structures and file naming conventions, recording phone calls, every email, means, biometric information, location information, etc. This “lifelogging” project and the resulting software tools were dubbed MyLifeBits, and is the subject of his book “Total Recall”. Oddly, he seems to have omitted any mention of Buckminster Fuller, but does tip his hat to Bush several times.

Total Recall is a fine book, if a bit light on the implementation details. Bell spends most of his time creating use cases and then demonstrating how situations can be improved when an “e-memory” is available to assist us. His scenarios include the typical office worker, health care, education, memorials, etc. Bell also considers the negative ramifications of storing everything. Obviously, if you store it, you can loose it or someone can steal it. Certainly privacy and security are issues when dealing with e-memory systems. We should probably spend some time figuring out the legal framework that will protect (or not) your life’s data. But I guess we’ll cross that road when we get to it. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, you might check out Robin Williams in “The Final Cut”, where all sorts of thorny issues surrounding e-memories are explored.

So while I’m convinced that storing everything is generally a good idea for us, society and future generations, I’m stuck on the implementation. When so much of our information is scattered among dozens of applications, devices and web sites, how could it be tracked, cataloged, annotated, archived and searched? A giant bucked of data in the cloud to which all your stuff is dumped? Distributed data stores that are crawled by software agents to gather information and synchronize it? Some hybrid approach?

This is fun stuff to day dream about. And I’m tempted to actually do some development of small tools to help bootstrap my own e-memories. What about you? If you could save everything, would you? Why, or why not? I’d love to hear your thoughts…