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Tuesday, December 01, 2009

I'm an analogue guy in a digital world

"Just an analog guy in a digital world
Out of touch half the time
In my old fashioned mind
Don’t know a ramped up scsi booster
From a pixilated font
A little simple truth is all I want."


Excerpt from the song by John Cassel

A couple of weeks ago I discovered to my horror that my electronic calendar had malfunctioned and all my reminders had been deleted. I'm the guy who always remembers birthdays, anniversaries, appointments etc. Not because I have such a good memory, but because I have everything written down.
Used to be that at the beginning of each year I would get a new diary and sit and mark all the important dates I needed to remember. Nowadays in the digital age I have an electronic diary that supposedly keeps track of this stuff year after year. Now suddenly everything was erased and I had to reprogram all the dates.
And that was when I discovered that the only date I could remember with no problem was my own birthday. The rest was a total blank (or I wasn't sure). So I had to swallow my pride and go ask everyone to give me all the correct dates.
That was when I realised that my memory loss is not confined to just dates. I can remember 3 phone numbers with no problems: my cell phone, my home phone and my parents home phone. All the rest I have to look up in my address book (and heaven forbid it should get erased like my calendar....). Oh, and I also remember the phone number of our old house from when I was a little kid and my mother made me memorise our address and phone number just in case I ever got lost or something...
I called up my sister to moan a bit about my memory problems (I had to look up her number in my address book), and she told me that nowadays nobody remembers phone numbers. Everybody has a cell phone with all the important numbers in its memory so nobody needs to remember any numbers.
This got me thinking. I used to hear a funny joke and then go and tell everybody I knew. And after 5-6 repetitions you remember a joke whether you like it or not. Nowadays I get a joke in my email, and forward it to everybody I know. Then the next day I barely remember that I read something funny, let alone the content.
I read somewhere about a guy who records on video everything that happens to him on every day (it was on one of my rss feeds,but of course I can't remember which one) and I thought wouldn't it be great if I could have all my important data backed up like that except accessible to me at any moment. Have everything recorded on an external memory device that I could access via a virtual link, sort of like having a USB memory device for my brain. (I'm sure I read something like this in a science fiction story somewhere....) But of course it wouldn't end with phone numbers and anniversaries. Wouldn't it be great to have all your music and books stored on something like that? Every time you wanted to listen to a song or look up some fact it would be as simple as accessing the correct file in your external memory. It would certainly make things easier for studying at school. And why stop there? Don't remember where you left the car keys? Scroll through your virtual memory and find where you threw them. Want to speak a foreign language? Download the appropriate language pack with all the vocabulary and dictionary. Need to get somewhere? Download a map with instructions. Want to learn to drive? There is a set of instructions that you can download.
Wouldn't that be great?
Of course, people being what they are, the first thing that would happen is that someone would write a virus that would wipe out all your stored information. You'd have people wandering around not knowing how to get home because their address was wiped from their memories (and not able to call anybody for help because they don't have any phone numbers). And think of all the accidents that would happen when people forgot how to drive in the middle of rush hour on the freeway.

UPDATE: just found this post... Seems I'm not hte only one with out of memory problems

1 Comments:

At 2:24 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Sweety, you're getting old.
But don't worry, by the end of this comment you'll forget it (again :P)

 

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