Memex

I now realise I forget everything. Partly I suppose as brain cells disappear but largely due to the increasing flood and diversity of information, coupled with trying to sort out all the new ideas to the exclusion of actually observing what is going on.
The idea of a perfect memory is not new. In a short story (“Funes the memorious”) Borges described a boy who remembered everything (and therefore – though I think this was implicit – ran into the stack overflow of remembering his remembering…)
Vannevar Bush proposed the “memex”, (a portmanteau of “memory extender”) is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article “As We May Think“. (from WP).
I am still digesting the implication of data-driven scholarship, and Marc Smith’s metaphor of our footprints in the digital sand – ca 10 terabytes per person. Clearly these are not at the level of Funes, though I think we can assume that virtually all our lives are non-private. For example when walking to our hotel in Phoenix we were videoed by three young skateboarders – presumably this will end up on YouTube – I have no idea why – are they budding film directors or identity thieves?
I think it’s inevitable that we shall soon have technology that records everything we do – not a new notion. A video implant in the forehead, an audio recoder in out earphone, a GPS for spacetime coordinates, intelligent software that adds metadata to people and other real-world objects. I expect this already exists in advanced computer science labs – I’m out of touch with nearly everything.
I hope it’s going to be fun.
 
(NB my spell checker is no longer working – another example of digital environment decay. Another >>15 minutes trying to put it right.)