I always wonder what the ‘hard disk’ capacity of the human brain is… maybe we’ve or will figure out ways to quantify it, but unlike the mechanical one, or even ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, it will be a long while before we can get to choose what the brain keeps and what it send to the recycle bin. Maybe, by that time, they will also figure out how to ‘upgrade’ the human brain’s capacity.
In terms of memories, we’ve been doing it forever, from clay tablets to computers, the aim has always been to store information, though processing and artifical intelligence did get into the picture later. But having notepad and word documents with dates and activities seems a strange way of documenting life.
Which, i am guessing, is the reasons I stick to Twitter, but am always on the lookout for lifestreaming tools, like the one I have installed here. Its quite twitter heavy but also pulls information from my blogs, and a few other online accounts. I am also hoping to add Facebook status messages to it soon, since that’s also a good chronicler of happenings. This one does that too, but I’m yet to find a way to integrate it here.
In case you’re wondering why this fascination for lifestreaming, think about how you feel when you see an old photograph, hear an old song, meet an old friend.. there are so many associations it throws up.. I bet you can recollect most of these associations now – the dress you were wearing in the photo, where you got it from, where its journey with you ended, why were you looking happy or sad; where you heard that song first, the mood change it causes in you and why, what was generally happening in your life then; under what circumstances you became friends, the fun you used to have together, shared incidents and so on…. Well, I, for one, am not sure, how far back I will be able to remember, what I’ll be able to remember, and for how long… and these things are important to me because together they are what is known as my life.. and it’d be sad if I couldn’t remember the details of my own life, through my own mind or its accessories… thats the reason behind this fascination for lifestreams… maybe its to do with being a sucker for nostalgia..maybe its the way I am built…
I think it would be quite soothing at a later date, to sit back and read up the stuff that brought me to where I’d be then.. to better understand who I was, and perhaps figure out why I did what I did, why things happened to me, and so on..in essence, hunting for a pattern in the chronicle of a human life…
until next time, the sum of our lives….
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