Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything Book

Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell is leading the charge to record every waking moment of your life (and even your sleeping ones) to digital media. *Total Recall* investigates what it would be like to be able to record and access all the data about your life anywhere anytime. Among other experiments, he wore a camera around his neck that took a picture automatically whenever the light changed, as when he entered a new room, and recorded his location via GPS; he tried out all sorts of health and medical recording gadgets, from the iPod pedometer to a bluetooth scale to monitor his weight, and a whole lot more.

The book describes the changes that cheap digital storage, automated recording equipment and computerized personalized search engines will make in our lives, probably whether we are willing participants or not, from careful monitoring of medical conditions over an entire lifetime to making it easier to eulogize an old friend, since you need no longer rely upon your own faulty memory or your disorganized paper records if you record everything to your "e-memory."

Bell's enthusiasm for the possible benefits of never losing another piece of information about yourself is admirable but his point of view has to be colored by the fact that he has resources at his disposal that the ordinary mortal cannot hope to muster: a personal assistant to scan and digitize all his paper records dating back to the beginning of his career at DEC in the 1960s and even farther back including his high school yearbooks, for example. His computer probably won't crash without a backup, destroying years' worth of family photos, and he probably has tech support to protect his personal information so identity theft may not be a big concern for him.

I contemplate the pile of old photo albums in my basement and despair of ever converting them all to digital. I am also painfully aware that simply digitizing everything doesn't make it "eternal" or easy to find. In fact, digital media requires constant vigilance to avoid data loss and obsolescence, and I'm not convinced that putting my entire life story in the cloud is a good idea. I'm not ready to trust my insurance company to keep track of all my exercise and eating records "for my own good," for example. But the reality is, more and more personal information is kept in bigger and bigger databases, so better to understand and use the march of "progress" to our own advantage than stick our heads in the sand. This book presents a useful peek into the not-too-distant future.