Cutline Speaks

What will you remember when you have a record of everything?

posted by The Cutline Team on November 26, 2008

In a recent article, David Pogue published his readers' comments from his column "Why I Shoot." Most of the comments highlighted how old home movies connected them to a past event or person, and some of the comments were quite touching.

The column reminisced about connecting with the past but missed an opportunity to evaluate what we should record looking forward. Up to this point in our history we've recorded very little and mostly in written form, so home movies are extremely rare and therefore, valuable. Tools like search engines are just starting to open up access to information but mostly in the written form (even most image searches rely on keywords - although that is changing).

So what happens when we can record everything? Not just emails and IMs, (we're basically already there) but a complete video and audio record of your day? Storage is constantly getting cheaper and more inventive gadgets for recording information come to the market every day. It seems inevitable that at some point children will have their entire life recorded.

When this happens who's going to look back at their grandparents daily lives when they can't even keep up with their own? It's quite possible our ability to record information will kill our interest in it.

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