26 October, 2013

Our Memory (And Selves) Will Belong To The Cloud � The Dish

Our Memory (And Selves) Will Belong To The Cloud � The Dish:
As the years go by, and our lives are digitally recorded in more and more ways, he argued, there will be digital versions of ourselves – from selfies to web trails, from precise consumer preferences to social networks, from thousands of emails and texts to videos and Facebook likes – that will have more data embedded in them than even the most industrious biographer could have used on the most famous person in the past. We will also come, inevitably, to refer to these digital summaries of ourselves, to remind us of our past, to get digital proof of previous loves or ideas or events or friends. We will therefore need to remember less and less, even as the imprint we make on the world becomes more and more indelible and eternal. We can just look them up, the way we reach for Google when we cannot remember the answer to a trivia question or need to resolve an empirical debate.

Writing a blog every day for thirteen years and counting brings that home rather firmly. So many feelings, thoughts, asides, facts, wishes, errors, home-runs, and massive fails are all there for anyone to see and for me to flinch from. But just as surely, I do not need to remember much of my life any more. It is remembered for me and exists in something we call the cloud. The cloud is eternal. It reaches into the depths of the past and makes it instantly accessible to the present and to any non-apocalyptic future.