Before I forget, Gordon Bell's an inspiration of mine. Saw an article in Fortune magazine about him; he's a guinea pig (and I mean this positively) for MyLifeBits, an ever-expanding electronic extension of his meat brain. His life is searchable, and apparently, he even hired help in the years before to archive the earlier times in his life before any of this got started.
Around the same time, I also acquired a digital voice recorder (Sony ICD-P320 with USB hookup) for the time when I'm typing one idea, then another simultaneously comes to my head and I have to blurt it out. Often, I drown in ideas, so it's certainly of great utility to have ways to store all that extraneous creativity for future processing.
I then looked back at the Second Life I've lived for over the last two years, and know I've catalogued a lot of it: through blog entries I've kept running chronicles, and when pictures said far more than I could keep up and type, I've taken snapshots. Thousands of them. (Well over 100,000 by this point, with many archived to DVD-Rs.) I've gotten into recording soundscapes too, although there's not much point in that, because unique sonic signatures continue to be a nascent development. Very few places you can close your eyes and go and know what it is, in the same fashion you'd recognize a great build.
But, in spite of that, and thinking of Bell's experiences, I can do a lot better. With the amount of time I spend in Second Life, work and play, keeping a LifeLog — dimensions beyond mere blogging — is something I'm open to. As I've mused before, if it weren't for privacy, I'd gladly open up the contents of my email inbox for all to see. But the world doesn't work that way, and we have many people concerned about secrets, because people often do wrong to each other.
That being said, I wonder if there are any cultures, even "remote" tribes, where privacy is a taboo. I bold-italicized that, because I feel it's a particularly important inquiry.
Who remembers Video Linden? (Ironic, when a camera doesn't forget. How about his spiritual successor and daughter-in-kind, Destroy TV? Beyond V-Linden, DTV keeps a running Flickr archive of many, many pictures snapped at regular intervals during her Second Life. Which would make for one heckuva time-lapse vid, and reminds me of how the whole percussion track of "The Internal Locus" from BT's This Binary Universe is compressed into four bars. Calling forth more means to digest time, you could look into photo-mosaic software like AndreaMosaic to take thousands of images and assemble them into the familiar form of one big, terribly familiar macro-montage.
(Tangent: there hasn't been a lot of artistic manipulation of time through Second Life machinima that I'm aware of, yet, so this remains another avenue of grand exploration.)
But back to Bell and how this is relevant for me: often when doing retrospectives, recalls, even performance reviews @ work, being able to archive, catalogue, and conjure forth specific moments easily is of tremendous utility. Fascinatingly enough — being able to retrieve a specific piece a friend's looking for, or having the general ability sum up what happened in the last few months, helps me get on with my life. It's like the old Dantz Retrospect adage, which went something like:
In order to go forward, you must backup.
And that's why I've become more dogged about using tags, prefixing filenames with keywords in brackets, and other means of findability.
After all, if you can't remember it, perhaps it never happened.