Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

inevitability of Total Recall as common practice.
    The Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are the cohort of Americans born approximately between 1982 and 2001. They came of age with Google, cell-phone cameras, file sharing, text messaging, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, and Twitter (the online-community service where friends and families post frequent, 140-words-or-less “microblog” entries about whatever they happen to be doing or thinking at that moment). A few formed software companies and became millionaires in their twenties.
    The seventy-million-plus Millennials are adept at multitasking. They listen to music, do homework, watch TV, and send instant messages—simultaneously. Nearly all own cell phones and computers. They snap pictures wherever they go. They socialize quite a lot online, chatting, trading music, and playing video games. Many stay in touch with their cliques so obsessively, they can’t bear to turn off their cell phones for a fifty-minute classroom session. If they misplace their smartphone, they feel as if they’ve lost their minds.
    Of course, no group of millions of people is going to be monolithic. Studies show that not all Millennials are as tech-savvy as legend would have it, but even the unsavvy ones tend to be much less intimidated by technology they don’t understand than their parents would be. This generation makes far less distinction between their private and public lives than even slightly older generations. The Internet is littered with millions upon millions of their blog entries, their photo streams, their fan fiction, their chat-forum entries, their comments on all of these things, and of course their comments on comments. Scads of them post everything from their youthful hijinks to their intimate confessions on YouTube. Posted videos often elicit avalanches of video responses, many of them raw and unrehearsed, showing the responders’ unfiltered, unedited reactions—on a site that literally billions of people can view.
    Those who put their lives up on the Web for others to view are called life bloggers ( blog being short for “Web log”). I am a lifelog ger, not a life blogger. That is, I log my life into my e-memory. I may be old-fashioned, but it strikes me as foolish to publish too much, especially to an unrestricted audience. There’s too much risk and too little benefit. My lifelogging is personal and private. I do it for the very pragmatic value that it gives back to me. Unlike those making the effort to create blog entries and YouTube clips, most of my lifelogging is automatic. When I share, I do it cautiously, considering the trustworthiness of the individual recipients. Public publishing is only for what I am glad to have the world associate with me—forever. Once out on the Web it is easily copied, so you cannot “take it back ”—it has become part of the permanent cyber landscape (or landfill) forever. If you are one of those who really want to share everything with the world, go ahead, it is your right. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
    While the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of digital life-chronicling, much of it is still ephemera, tossed-off throwaway documents like nineteenth-century theater billings and political pamphlets (which historians now drool over, by the way). Most of this chronicling is still haphazard: Parties, outings, and weekends are extensively digitally commemorated, but drives to school, study sessions, and dinner at the grandparents’ are not. I’ve observed people who are happy to record minutely from their lives, but they aren’t systematic about it. They record the things they think are important or cool or memorable at the time, but they don’t yet record everything they see, hear, do, send, receive, read, and compose.
    This isn’t necessarily reticence on their part, because the software tools and hardware accompaniments for easy lifelogging aren’t readily available