A New Approach to the Memex

In 1945, Vannevar Bush pub­lished his now infa­mous arti­cle in the Atlantic enti­tled “As We May Think.” In that arti­cle, he pro­posed the idea of the memex, a com­puter like device that would record its user’s inter­ac­tions with the world for easy retrieval later. The sys­tem was based on micro­film (it was 1945, after all), and was meant to emu­late human memory’s asso­cia­tive pow­ers. The memex became the work­ing inspi­ra­tion for hyper­text tech­nolo­gies, which now drive the Web and its 2.0 applications.

Yet the memex’s mem­ory func­tions were largely over­looked by tech­nol­o­gists since 1945, not because the idea lacked merit but because tech­nol­ogy could not ful­fill the require­ments of record­ing daily life. Now things have changed. According to an arti­cle pub­lished in the March issue of Scientific American, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell say that new projects par­tially funded by Microsoft’s research wing have made life record­ing possible.

The pro­gram, called MyLifeBits, uses mas­sive stor­age hard­ware (terrabytes’ worth), auto­matic cam­eras, bio­met­ric sen­sors, and soft­ware to track your dig­i­tal life. The result if the pro­gram were used for an extended period of time, say a life­time, would be an indexed, search­able archive of every­thing you’ve said and done.

As one exam­ple from the arti­cle goes: Say you remem­ber that you were on a cer­tain Web page when you got a phone call from a friend or stu­dent. You want to find out what that Web page’s address was so you can cite it in a paper, but you can’t remem­ber the title. Just per­form a MyLifeBits search for all Web pages viewed dur­ing phone calls with that stu­dent and abracadabra!

The idea is to make it all data­base dri­ven and meta-tagged. That makes all the infor­ma­tion highly search­able, much like the Semantic Web that some the­o­rists are pre­dict­ing will usurp the World Wide Web in com­ing decades. Software alarms could mon­i­tor pat­terns and report on reg­u­lar­i­ties. Are you eat­ing too much? Has your heart rate changed lately? The com­puter could com­pare data to archived records and deter­mine whether you’re in need of a phys­i­cal or whether you’re being just plain unpro­duc­tive. Imagine, a pop-up win­dow on your screen telling you that you’re spend­ing too much time e-mailing some­one who’s not impor­tant enough to war­rant that amount of time. By god, that’s progress!

Of course, Plato would have a fit. After all, he thought writ­ing would be enough to ruin human mem­ory for good. He’s already reeled in his grave at the advent of per­sonal orga­niz­ers and date­books. Now the tech­nol­ogy exists to all but replace human mem­ory. Will peo­ple cease rely­ing on their own brains in favor of the eas­ier, dig­i­tal approach? Will we stop remem­ber­ing mun­dane details like phone num­bers and names because we know we have a backup? Will this hurt human mem­ory or free it to think on more impor­tant matters?

And socially, how will be tol­er­ate a new group of cyborgs (in the Donna Haraway sense) who wear their tech­nol­ogy, lit­er­ally, on their sleeve? Digital sen­sors would intrude on some people’s sense of pri­vacy until time and pop­u­lar­ity wore that sense away. Court pro­ce­dures would change immensely as the evi­dence would be neatly stored in server farms. Circumstantial evi­dence would become a thing of the past, as would hearsay. The record could stand for itself.

All this striv­ing for per­fect rec­ol­lec­tion reaches for the per­ma­nence of mem­ory, to make mem­ory objec­tive. There were after all at least three dif­fer­ent record­ings of Christ’s final words. That sort of inef­fi­cient writ­ing would be a thing of the past. Memory not only departs the sub­jec­tive realm, it become objec­ti­fied in the process of becom­ing objec­tive. It becomes a com­mod­ity, an indus­try, valu­able to more than one person.

Imagine. With all the hub­bub over Anna Nicole Smith’s corpse, how do you think the courts of the future would han­dle the posthu­mous dis­po­si­tion of a person’s life record? The tabloids could have a field day with all the accu­rately recorded infidelities!

Is dig­i­tal mem­ory like this inevitable? It does have cer­tain ben­e­fits, but do they out­weigh the cur­rent cul­tural value of pri­vacy and per­sonal memory?

Related posts:

1. A Perfect Memory
2. Digital Media Doctorate
3. Trek Tech: Tricorders
4. Intertextuality
5. “Quid pro quo, Clarice”: Journalists should be inter­viewed too