For those of us without Hyperthymesia, technology is quickly approaching a potential reality of being able to capture our life experiences in their entirety.
I adore Evernote (slogan “Remember Everything”), and take loads of notes in it, capture photos, thoughts, anything I anticipate I’ll want to recall later. I don’t trust my memory for any facts, I only trust it with concepts. But what about those things that I didn’t anticipate I’d want to recall? Those are seemingly lost forever.
I find the idea of having a databank of everything I’ve ever seen, heard, or done to be quite compelling. Evernote definitely has this aspiration, and slowly we’re seeing more technology crop up to support the idea. The latest attempt to capture life as you experience it is being done by Looxcie. Once that sort of camera can be embedded and powered wireless, and become socially acceptable, and can stream to gargantuan data storage in the cloud…well, then we’ll be closer to the dream.
The challenge with information capture today is that it’s still too damn manual. We can either spend time living, or spend time capturing our lives, it’d be nice to be able to do both.