Jill points to and article on Personal Life Annotation Devices. Weblogs, as a technology, are nothing but a system of rapid publication to the web. But the engender a new way of thinking about communication. The function of a blog is not that different from the functions that have endlessly been put forward for mass and personal communication. They just seem to perform these functions in a much more integrated way.
The article is less about text-blogging than it is about photoblogging. Of course, a million (or a hundred million) photoblogs with shots throughout the day is interesting, but more interesting is when all of these are classified, integrated, and accessible. It allows for a new kind of surveillance (and not necessarily in the nasty “big brother” sort of way) of everyday life.
How lightweight (both literally and in the user-interface sense) must a device be to make it a useful real-life annotation system. It must provide both a nearly transparent way of recording a life, but equally important, it must figure out how to skip over the boring stuff.
That last bit is kind of interesting. I mentally already skip over the boring stuff in my memory –as well as some of the not-so-boring stuff, unfortunately. Forgetting is an amazing valuable cognitive function. Creating PLADs (woo-hoo, new acronym) that augment our memory is a huge project, but it only forestalls an even bigger one: devices that augment forgetting.
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the problem with forgetting is that people forget important parts and frequently only remember those parts that participate in nostalgia. of course remembering isn’t all it is cut out to be either. i like to think that somehow these devices participate in mcluhan’s amputation thesis….
“devices that augment forgetting.”
Those would be called “martinis,” dude.
Oh, yeah. I forgot. :)
Actually, I’ve been thinking a little more deeply about this: see http://Blogger.iftf.org/Future/000178.html.
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