The changing fidelity of the past

2015-01-25 1 min read

    A fun exercise is picking a random day in the past and trying to recreate it using the various tools at our disposal. In my case the most useful ones are my calendars, both personal and work, the photos I took, and Foursquare/Swarm. As long as I was vigilant in documenting the events it’s simple to figure out what I did. We lose a bit of the mystery when we document our lives and we no longer have long discussions trying to recreate events with friends. I don’t know whether this is better or worse but we’ll probably see more and more of this happening. Our phones are already collecting our location and video is becoming increasingly popular. Now we have high fidelity versions of recent events but only vague memories of our childhood. I wonder whether kids that are growing up now will have access to accurate memories of their childhood when they grow up and what the impact will be.