Choosing to remember

"There’s too much to remember. Sometimes you gotta forget about the past," said Antonio Pierro, war veteran (Esquire, Jan 08).

Not according to Gordon Bell. This dude is trying to record his whole life. His entire life. See On The Media, a story called The Persistence of Memory.

He's a computer scientist, a senior researcher for Microsoft, and part of a movement known as “lifelogging,” digitally keeping "every letter and photo, every phone call, email and video, every conversation, keystroke and scrap of paper, the entire minutiae of his daily routine, onto a hard drive."

As a hoarder of photos and letters from childhood, I'm not really one to judge. His explanation intrigued me:

"Why does anybody ever preserve anything? Is there any value to having a photograph of my mother at age three or so, you know...?"

Do we hold onto these relics from our past because they're valuable, or do we attach the value to them by holding on? Where is the value in the things we keep? And if memory is merely the retention of, and ability to recall, information and personal experiences... I wonder if the human memory can ever be eclipsed by an electronic one.

Media 08 (part 3)

Niall Kennedy stepped up to the plate. Widget king – he runs the Widget Summit in San Fran. One thing he said completely stuck: “Because we’re all in this room, we share an interest, so we’re somewhat in a relationship.” It hit me that when people find their passion, and are able to share interests collectively, they ultimately become happier to be alive since, as Chris McCandless wrote, "Happiness to be real must be shared."

Kaiser Kuo, former rock star and forever cool dude, talked about China’s wild, wild web. That any day now, China will overtake with THE most internet users.

Instant messaging in China is massive; it is more important than email – totally trumps it. Chinese use IM as a primary internal and external business communications tool.

QQ- the company one must understand if to understand Chinese internet market. Captures zeitgeist of China’s digital age. 36 million concurrent users. That's a big number.

I enjoyed this pearl: "The 'venture' is VC is crap – they’re not adventurous. So if you want to raise the capital, you’ve got to show something that’s already been proven to be a safe bet." He mentioned that the low-hanging fruit has largely already been picked: YouTube, Facebook, etc have already been invented.

One of the best things about Media 08 was covert life advice from the speakers during the coffee breaks. I don't know when adults went from being my parents' friends at dinner parties, to colleagues, but the transition happened pretty quickly. The best thing about being in your early twenties is that you're still so open to the world, and I appreciated hearing from Benjamin Joffe about how any goal is possible when you plan the end first and then work backwards in establishing your next steps.

Assia Grazioli-Venier also pointed out that while starting a company sounds cool, it’s best done after a couple of years of work experience. You’re not going to know what kind of employer you want to be until you’ve been an employee. University is good for time management skills and learning to juggle, but you have to get out there in the real world to try on different career paths, and see what fits. You have to find out who you are and what you're passionate about before you can run a successful company.

She also pointed out this cool made-for-online TV show.

Media 08 (part deux)

Next up was Alan Noble, from Google. Did you know? Google maps was started in Oz. He reckons that gadgets are the latest – a.k.a. widgets. They're mini-applications, ad are becoming the new building blocks of a whole new web.

Google culture dictates, “There’s never an end to innovation. Things can always be better, more user-friendly, etc.” It reminds me of Pam... the chilled-out perfectionist who inspires better results because she has the confidence to believe in them. Maybe mediocrity can never happen if it's not allowed to happen.

Jonathan Haagen from the Economist Intelligence Unit mentioned that nowadays there is no such thing as “virtual reality.” It got me thinking about how the Internet has totally blurred the boundaries between presence and absence... how the confirmation of our sense of being is now attached to somewhere beyond the immediate.

The computer is now a small army of positions that used to be filled by real people - postman, bank clerk, bookstore assistant. The screen has cost us those social interactions. We can't even mark the lines of reality anymore: when you check your bank statement online, it's a real number, a real bank, a real customer..."real" in the off-line sense. Is there even a difference?

On a similar note, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb said that pages are no longer center of the web, now data and services are. He mentioned the onset of the semantic web – machines talking to machines, and making the web more “intelligent”. A semantic application, I learned, determines the meaning of text and other data, and then creates connections for users.

He mentioned that the magic of Facebook was “the global mapping of everyone and how they are related” and this linked to Jonathan’s point about how our offline selves and the social furniture of our lives are increasingly translated into the online world.

As people travel more and more, I don't think an old-fashioned address book cuts it. You need more than just the details of people you meet on journeys, you want to remember how you're linked, the mutual friends, etc... it's as if globalisation's making socialising so much more insanely multi-layered that Facebook becomes a need instead of a luxury; a method of preservation in a world that's moving faster than we can keep up with alone.

Media 08 (Part 1)

I’m in a room full of people, hoping they won’t realize that I don’t belong. I should be in class back in Melbourne. Instead, I’m at Media 08 in Sydney, an event run by X | Media | Lab, “the internationally acclaimed think-tank and creative workshop for digital media professionals.”

Who am I kidding? Everyone's talking about widgets... huh? They blog (live) on their Macbooks. I take notes (slowly), with a pen.

I am (cringeworthy) old school in the new media world. Then again, technology isn’t my main passion.

It’s the social connections and communication in a borderless world, the alternate possibilities through screen culture. Or maybe I'm just telling myself that to make up for my digital retardation.

Vicky Taylor from the BBC talked about how on a single day in July, over 2 million people came to BBC site, during the floods around Gloucestershire. The BBC website gave people a much-needed forum to swap stories, share advice, and question authorities.


What does this mean about machines becoming more valuable than people, during a crisis?

Brendan introduced Mohamed Nanabhay by saying that Al-Jazeera are light-years ahead of BBC and CNN in terms of user-generated content.



The video got over a million hits. This mainstream media outlet is using (presently) "alternative" forms of production to alter the mainstream itself, from the inside out. Mohamed mentioned, the key driving force of new media is the participatory aspect - the reader is also now the creator:

“To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media… Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.”

– Rupert Murdoch, quoted in Wired, July 2006

He also used a quote at the end that reminded me of how integrity leads to freedom: “Telling the truth is hard. Not telling it is even harder.”

He mentioned industry trends of content going online whether you like it or not; internal resistance to change; the fact that we’re dealing with new business models. Where does internal resistance to change come from...what does it take to force people, or businesses, to change – is catastrophe the only true catalyst?