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“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” — Chinese Proverb
I use the popular service Evernote. They make the case that their service serves as an external brain for those that use it. In some ways, I believe them (at least external memory, if not external brain). While I don’t use all the features of the service, it is comforting to know that as I come across something I would like to remember I can store it somewhere and come back to it when needed.
Recently, Seth Godin made a great point in Personal Branding in the Age of Google that while checking into applicants for a babysitting position he “Googled” each applicant and learned a lot about them through posts they had made on Facebook and other social sites. [A good read on this is Oh, What a Tangled Web Print We Leave, by Brett Popplewell] This is a great example of how people’s behaviors on-line mirror their off line identities. At least for those people that use their own identities on-line.
In Coming to Grips with an Internet That Never Forgets, Michael Geist showed us how Google never forgets. Each of us can make time machines of sorts by Googling a company, individual, or general topic and have returned to you a list of events, press releases, marketing materials, opinions, announcements, etc over time.
Let us all remember that Internet based search engines hold the worlds collective memory. Individually, these memories don’t decay over time, they don’t morph into other memories, they don’t get lost or forgotten.
It is also woth noting that unlike Wikipedia, there is no self policing or self correcting mechanism in place. The memories are in many cases biased, unedited, and unfiltered. The memories are not so much facts as data points which should be considered with the same care as all other data points we collect in our day to day lives.
The Internet never forgets. It also has no (or very little context) with with any of the individual data points reside. Given this we should take care in what we put into this collective memory, and take equal care when we reach into the time machine.
