With the rise of the social networking phenomenon, many of us have begun to actively create content online. Some of it will probably live on forever but some of it will be deleted or destroyed - never to be seen again.
There are some Twitter posts that their authors would rather be forgotten, but for others it’s a loss of something that they may not even realise they will miss.
This is also true for our memories. Some of the things we’d like to forget will stay with us the longest, and some of the things we cherish will fade with time.
In the September 09 edition of Wired there is an article about a Microsoft research project that has set out to capture as many of these day-to-day interactions as technologically possible.
The researcher running the project is Gordon Bell, and the project is an attempt to counteract the inevitable loss of memory that people experience throughout their lifetimes. By recording conversations, taking random digital snapshots, as well as storing emails and other material, Microsoft Research are hoping to create a data store that will be much more reliable than the human brain.
The rationale behind the research seems to be the idea that this loss of memory is not a desirable attribute in humans but in fact a design flaw. I’m not sure that I’d agree, partly because it seems to assume that there is some ultimate purpose for which our brains are designed and that photographic memory would be evolutionarily advantageous.
Also, because our memories are not replicas of data stored in digital format, they’re informed and shaped by our feelings and experiences and are therefore full of holes before we even forget them. Memory would seem to serve a different or additional purpose other than verbatim recollection.
That said, it’s an interesting approach to the problem of memories fading over time, and one that I’m sure would prove useful when you need to prove to your mate exactly who won that argument in the pub last Friday.