Saturday, June 09, 2007

Memories Are Made of This

I know, I know, you were expecting my regular-octane juvenile humor: "Mammaries are made of this HAHAhahaha."

As for dissecting memories, it's been a recurring theme, not dream, of The Laughorist blog (soon to celebrate its first blogiversary). As surely Marcel Proust illustrated lushly to the extreme, our memories are tricky, subjective, and flirtatious; we rarely know what doors they will open. And we don't know if we dare believe what we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel when we walk through those memory doors. That was part of the thesis of
Stumbling on Happiness: the human propensity to color, or discolor, past (or future) events.

I just read an interesting take on this sort of thing by Alec Wilkinson, in The New Yorker issue of May 28, 2007 (do we really not write "19" anymore? does anyone remember writing 19XX [well, not really the X's] on checks, essays, reports, summonses, divorce decrees, baptismal certificates, marriage licenses, postcards, and letters of resignation? I do).

The article is about one Gordon Bell, who is lifelogging. He is creating a personal archive, a database of everything he can scan into a computer about his current and past life. MyLifeBits is what the project's called. He now works for Microsoft and wears a special camera as part of this all-consuming venture and experiment (experiventure, call it).

We bloggers think we're obsessive?

Think again.

It's all rather intriguing. Bell, 72, one of the founders of the Internet who has been called the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers, and Microsoft want to see how computers act when they establish a responsive relationship with our memories, or what we digitally tell a computer is our memories. Thus, a computer could easily say, "Watch out, Pawlie, you are entering the trough you typically enter after 17.268954 days. And it will last 3.000012223 days."

Or so I gather.

There's all sorts of potential ramifications to this sort of thing, some wonderful, some frightful. Microsoft's Jim Gemmell says in the article, "People argue about the need to forget things, but if you look at business discipline -- advising that you write everything down, your goals and objectives, and return to them to see how you did, examining what went wrong -- I think the same thing could happen with our personal lives. Being able to say, 'Now I realize my tone of voice was threatening' -- I think there's a real positive aspect in having the real record of what things looked and sounded like, and sequences of events, because we often end up believing things that are not based on facts anymore."

Really, Jim? Great. That's all I need. Computer as Grand Inquisitor. Computer as Torquemada.

Leave it to a software engineer to quantify memory.

Imagine this after-the-so-called fact bedroom debriefing: a blow-by-blow analysis on the fruitfulness (or dearth of ripe yield) in the garden of earthly pleasures, id est, orgasm or its lack. Let's cal this the Sixth Circle of Hell. And the Seventh Circle of Hell would go beyond anyone's worst nightmare of "he said, she said." It would be a recording with painful precision not only of the words but also the feelings and motives of the players.

We don't even what to imagine applying this beyond the home to the workplace or the public arena.

O spare us, HAL 9000.


This digitalization of memory gives new meaning to that line by James Joyce, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'd rather take refuge in the facts as I remember them, filtered by my psyche, not HAL's.

(Wouldn't you?)


(Say, what would Steve Jobs and Apple say to all this?)

Is it all agonizingly Orwellian? Or enticingly Proustian?

Wilkinson, a fine writer (I once read an essay he wrote about the legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell, whom I met, briefly, in the 1980s, wherein Maxwell told the young Wilkinson to send a manuscript by means of letters to Maxwell; brilliant), writes: "Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth."

Whatever that is.

May you remember This.

6 comments:

Army said...

First off, I love the corporate angle this whole memory project stinks of: remembering everything from a meeting? Um, excuse me, but I relish in knowing that most of that innane drivel slides away and doesn't take up precious (albeit, virtually unlimited) cargo space.

Why must we fook with nature? Our biology is what it is because we've adapted that way. Perfection? Hardly. But there's something to be said about the act of forgetting (I just don't remember what it is, har har). It tidies up the brain. These hacks want to clog it back up. Fanks, but no fanks.

If you want see patterns in your behavior, turn off the TV, iPod, Blackberry, et al., shut the fook up, and stop doing. Just be. Think in quiet reflection. Notice yourself when you are in situations that don't work as you figured. Ask yourself, why is that? It's called observation.

Meanwhile, if I want to be reminded of everything at the most inconvenient time, I already have a mother.

Wanderlust Scarlett said...

Army... laughed out loud... very good. Mum's definitely the word.

PK - excellent post. Really excellent. My memory is something of a joke among friends and family, it is selective and unreliable. So I say.

I have been journaling this and that for the last 7 or so years and I have consistently found that if I'd only listened to myself when I gave myself advice about a thing, then it would certainly have turned out better than it did. Knowing this, I reread often now. In this way, it is good to have the benefit of records. Plus after I've passed, posterity could glean whatever little wisdom there may be from my experiences, that it wants.
But... whatever is not important enough to be written down is not important enough to be remembered and I am NOT keen on the concept of a machine figuring out cycles of my life... I'd rather just go find out whatever there is to find and be surprised. I also don't want to remember certain aspects, as I am sure everyone agrees... some things are better left in the dark.

love your writing

Scarlett

Glamourpuss said...

I'm rather fond of the idea of being a flirtatious memory.

Puss

Kewlgirl said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Pawlie Kokonuts said...

Army,
Well said. As always. Ever hear the Irish song "Tell me Ma"?

WS,
Some things, um, are better left in the dark, though I've heard it said intellectuals do IT with lights on. And it's not just a suburban legend.

P,
Consider yourself in the Simmering Database of Flirtatious Memories (SDOFM).

PK

azgoddess said...

love your post and so Hal -- what DO you think about this?

man oh man -- they need to watch that movie again...sigh

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