I read this article, and I know exactly what he's thinking about--that idea that sometimes occurs, where we realize that brains aren't really all that good at holding a memory the way it is. Facts get distorted. Details blur, or switch out with those of similar events. Emotions color how we see the events to begin with, and our interpretations, which then become memories, probably won't add up with someone else's. And then you get that idea where you want to know what actually happened.
I've been getting Timehop in my inbox. You link it to your twitter account, and it then sends you an email every morning that tells you all your tweets from the same day the previous year. Since Twitter doesn't show anything older than a month anymore, I find it pretty amazing, and since I've been getting the emails (which are always really positive and cheerful), I've been paying a little more attention to what I tweet so that next year, better tweets come through the 'Hop. But it occurs to me after reading this article, that it's getting easier and easier for the internet to remember exactly what we were doing. Batsha talks about Gmail as an archive, and searching bank records and cellphone details. I would add comments on Facebook, Twitter updates, pictures on Instagram (or Dailybooth or Facebook or Twitpic) of what we're eating or who we're hanging out with or what we're wearing. Getglue tells us what we were watching, and sometimes what we thought of it. Foursquare tells us everywhere we weren't too embarrassed or too distracted about and checked into. Foodspotting shows us what we ate, Livestrong shows us how much we exercised, Endomondo shows us what exercises we did and how far we went.
We might not be able, exactly, to reconstruct a whole thought pattern, but we have more and more points that outline that pattern. The problem is getting it all in line in one place, and that's where things like Memolane come in handy--they try their best to be so open-ended that you can plug anything into them, and they'll collect all the info up in a timeline, each day strung along a meta-timeline showing you your whole digital life.
Some people say it's the death of memory. I think it's more like the evolution of scrapbooking. Make it all digital so it no longer has to pile up in boxes (which is what I used to do, and do much, much less since I got an internet-capable phone). It saves the things that help us remember, and links them all in the objective way that brains can't, so that we can see what we were like, for good and for bad. We can be archaeologists of ourselves.
I'm hoping it helps people understand themselves better. That it helps memories stay stronger, longer. I'm hoping that when we finally upload our memories entirely to the internet, it's built on things like this, so we can go back and see them all again.
