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Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This work is part personal journal, part manifesto, and part self-help book. Essentially, Gordon Bell tries to make a good case for the “inevitable revolution” towards “Total Recall” (caps, mind you) that will “force” us to “adapt” to it. His diction gives you a good sense of what’s to come, sigh.
If you can stomach his single-mindedly evangelical agenda, you’ll find that this book pursues some interesting ideas about the implications of recording as many details of one’s life as possible. And not just in writing, but in photos, sound, video, drawings, scanned documents, GPS locations, chat logs, pedometer readings, etc. etc.
His primary argument is that we (as in the human race) are on an accelerating pathway towards this state of recording everything ever about our personal lives. He observes that we already have cultural/behavioral trends such as microblogging and increased “surveillance” of our offspring, and points out the sheer fact that we now have all the tools that enable logging, recording, and note-taking at our disposal.
He continues by saying we ought to embrace this trend because of a host of benefits in healthcare, education, national security, work, day-to-day life, and even post mortem. There are, undeniably, benefits that you can’t argue with: detailed recordings of minute-to-minute physical status for health records can be invaluable in diagnosing a disease with vague symptoms. But there are thornier ideas too. For instance, Bell totally adores the idea of a “cyber-twin” that goes on “living” and pretending to be you after you die, so your grandkids can talk to “you.” This simultaneously piques my curiosity and scares me silly, but the biggest part that bugs me is that he does not go on to explore it much beyond saying “Wouldn’t that be SO COOL?” Clearly this is a book about breadth, not depth, and as such, it spends more time reveling in enthusiastic speculation rather than critique and inquiry. As usual, I kind of wish there were more of the latter.
Bell ends the book by providing general instructions on how you can begin recording every detail of your own life too (this is where the self-help comes in). Here’s where his argument that “Total Recall” is upon us falls apart, I think. By detailing all the technological infrastructure required and all the ways we’d have to “adapt” to using it, he only highlights how tremendous a commitment it would be to “life-log.” It would pretty much have to be a person’s one and only hobby. Imagine scrapbooking, but times a million. And the money, wow, you would have to have a smartphone, a GPS device, a digital camera, a scanner, a PC, an e-reader, body-monitoring devices, backup solutions x3 both on- and off-site, shelves of DVDs… Life logging is clearly not for the busy or the poor.
Of course, I buy the idea that tools will get ever-cheaper and technological paradigms will rearrange themselves beyond recognition in 10 years, but this last part of the book, his clarion call to begin lifelogging here and now, still rings utterly hollow to me because we aren’t 10 years in the future yet! It is, literally, the most useless chapter, because it isn’t thorough enough to be actually instructive, nor does it introduce new ideas.
By this point, he has beaten us over the head with the idea that Total Recall is coming faster and surer than the Redcoats and it will make our lives absolutely wonderous. But he has also given the reader a lot to be skeptical about. Rather than spend an extra chapter tackling the skeptics head-on, he chooses to sidestep them by saying “well, there will always be skeptics, but let’s ignore them, BECAUSE THE REVOLUTION IS UPON US. LET’S DO THIS THAAAANG.”
Anyway.
My last point is more about a technical shortcoming on the book’s part: Bell doesn’t distinguish clearly enough between the problems of “recording” and “recall.” There’s a lot of time spent on the endless possibilities of recording, and hardly any on how to organize it effectively. He does recognize the issues of data longevity, the importance of metadata and the need to unify our data, but he doesn’t address nearly enough how monumental the challenge of organizing a lifetime’s data is. His only answer seems to be “keep at it, just do it.” I wish he’d share more of what he learned in his personal experiences.
The final verdict: I think it is worth a read, if only for the impassioned arguments that will hopefully result from some of its claims. Insofar as a book of potentially controversial predictions about the future goes, this is pretty good.
Kaffehausdekadenzmoderne is Tina's blog about all sorts of awesome things. Mostly, this involves food, art, design, and sometimes Actionscript 3. It's a way for her to keep track of and share the many things she finds tough, inspiring, delicious, or worth pondering. Other than that, there's no real rhyme or reason to it. (more)
I agree with your argument on the premise’s shortcoming. Data is easy to collect (in general — very specific data can be extremely hard to collect however). Interpreting data is often far beyond hard. Scientists and engineers make a living out of it.
The amount of information about our lives may be growing exponentially, but the ability to sort, decipher, understand, and use that data is still quite a task.
@Joel, Like in the Caprica pilot. They totally side step how cylons were created with the ‘A genius girl synthesized all her life data into a killer cyber twin, but then she died so she can’t tell us how it was done.’ Lame.
I like the idea of being able to access everything about myself ever, but what would happen if someone stole digital me? It would be so much worse than identity theft.
Also, stalker horror films would be much shorter. Less ‘I know where you’re hiding’ and more ‘I know how often your heart is beating. I know you wore pink kitten heals this morning. I know your glucose levels are low.’ Then she’d get stabbed, the end.