The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (18 page)

Having thus made up his family
, he was continually making entertainments, and impertinently troubling his guests with his second-hand learning; for he had always someone at his feet to prompt him every now and then with verses.

While his company may have rolled their eyes, Sabinus himself thought this was an elegant solution to his problem; he claimed that since the slaves were part of his property, their knowledge was his as well. This, naturally, left him open to ridicule by his less sluggish friends. One fellow, Satellius Quadratus, witnessed Sabinus’s Google-slave display and told him he’d be a fine wrestler. Sabinus was, in fact, a sickly man and answered, “How can I? I can scarcely stay alive now.”

“Don’t say that, I implore you,” replied Satellius. “Think how many perfectly healthy slaves you have.”

• • • • •

No matter how rich we are, none of us can purchase for ourselves a fine mind. Clive Thompson may believe that the “perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that’s true only if we consider the act of thinking to be mainly the assemblage of collected facts. I’m guessing those dinner guests at Sabinus’s place weren’t fooled by his off-loaded memory. Why, then, are we?

Of course, we’ve always jerry-rigged ways to bookmark our memories; the longing to Google long predated the technology. Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at New York University, saw in his personal library a crude attempt to bolster his brainwork:

Every dog-eared page
represents a hole in my memory. Instead of trying to memorize a passage in the book or remember an important statistic, I took an easier path, storing the location of the desirable memory instead of the memory itself. Every dog-ear is a meta-memory, a pointer to an idea I wanted to retain but was too lazy to memorize.

Seife makes an important point here. The Internet is only one instance of our dog-eared recall system. Every table of contents, every index, every card catalog, is a concession to the limits of human memory.
¹⁶
Writing itself is the most unabashed of our helpers; it excuses us constantly from storing information ourselves. Remember that in the oral culture that King Thamus bade adieu, a person’s ability to think was dictated by his or her capacity to hold information at a personal level; knowledge stopped where a person’s memory stopped. Wisdom, too, was measured by memory. We abhor that limitation, though, and have been in the business of off-loading more and more human memory for centuries. Clearly we aren’t about to drop such help, especially as the store of human knowledge expands. So what we’re really dealing with is a question of attitude. Has the Internet turned a helpful tactic into a monostrategy? Seife continues:

As the Web grew
, my browsers began to bloat with bookmarked Web sites. And as search engines matured, I stopped bothering even with bookmarks; I soon relied on AltaVista, HotBot, and then Google to help me find—and recall—ideas. My meta-memories, my pointers to ideas, started being replaced by meta-meta-memories, by pointers to pointers to data. Each day, my brain fills with these quasi-memories, with pointers, and with pointers to pointers to pointers, each one a dusty IOU sitting where a fact or idea should reside.

As for me, I’ve grown tired of using a brain that’s full of signposts only, a head full of bookmarks and tags and arrows that direct me to external sources of information but never to the information itself. I’d like to know for myself when
La Bohème
was composed and what Jung actually said about dreams and where exactly Uzbekistan may be. I want a brain that can think on its own, produce its own connections from a personalized assortment of facts. Because it seems that the largest database in the world—stuffed with catalog upon catalog of information—still lacks the honed narrative impulse of a single human mind.

• • • • •

In ancient Rome and Athens, individuals began employing the highly personalized “method of loci” to draw more external information inside their heads and keep it ordered there. Essentially an elaborate mnemonic device, the method involves the construction in one’s mind of a detailed building—sometimes called a “memory palace”—inside which memories can then be “placed.” If you have a thorough memory of the house you grew up in, for example, you can place a series of memories on the doorstop, along the staircase, and inside your bedroom. As you mentally travel through the fixed image of your childhood home, pieces of furniture or other details will then trigger the stored memory. Even in antiquity they knew the value of pointers. Memory champions today still swear by the method.

The attempt to collect a lifetime’s worth of information into an organized and manageable interior space appeared again in a Renaissance endeavor—the cabinet of curiosities. Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria, kept an elaborate collection of painted portraits depicting people with bizarre physical deformities in his
Wunderkammer;
the cabinet of Russian czar Peter the Great housed deformed human and animal fetuses and other biological rarities. Cabinets of curiosities were for the corporeal world what memory palaces were for the mind.

What’s interesting to me about cabinets of curiosities and the method of loci is that they are both attempts—devised when the idea of memory existing in “the cloud” would have seemed preposterous—to pull a world’s worth of material into a small, navigable space, one that is privately owned. One can imagine the necessary memory palaces growing larger and larger with each generation, wings and turrets getting stapled onto the sides as we attempt to hold ever more preposterous loads of information. Similarly, the cabinets of curiosities buckle beneath the weight of our discoveries. Both endeavors, though, are very different from the dematerialized and unholdable “cloud” memories championed by Wikipedia and Google. To remember, goes the earlier assumption, you must first digest the outside world and carry it around with you.

This assumption pervaded our thinking until very recently. Consider the case of Sherlock Holmes, who described his own prodigious (and pre-Internet) memory in his debut appearance, an 1887 novel called
A Study in Scarlet
.

I consider that a man’s brain
originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic.

Holmes may have taken this approach too far in his own life. (We learn in the first few chapters that the genius sleuth remains willfully ignorant of fine literature and even the Copernican revelation that the earth goes around the sun—he feels that both subjects would “clutter” his mind.) But the point is that Sherlock Holmes
curates
his memory. He’s describing something very like the method of loci here. In both cases, memory is seen as a physical, aesthetically defined space. And in both cases, it is assumed that our job is to
choose,
to
select
what is worthy of placement in the palace of our memory. Human minds (Sherlock Holmes excepted) may be messy places and full of error, but it’s the honing, the selection of what’s worth remembering, that makes a mind great. Our sense of self is derived in part from all the material we carve away. The limits of the human body, and the human mind, too, are the borders that define us.

• • • • •

Today, the urge to outdo human memory is expressed in our abiding love of computer records.

“Lifeloggers,” who account for their comings and goings in online reports, now find that they can enjoy “total recall” thanks to programs like Timehop, an app that mines information from one year prior to today’s date and tells users where they went, what they were listening to, and how they were doing on this, the anniversary of “anytime.” Data is culled from users’ Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts, and Instagram accounts, among others, to create a digital reminiscence that rough and fuzzy human memory simply can’t compare with. It is, in the company’s own (vaguely morbid) words, “a time capsule of you.”

I spoke with the start-up’s young founder and CEO, Jonathan Wegener, a Columbia grad (double major in sociology and neuroscience); he lives in Brooklyn, where Timehop’s HQ is located. Wegener made short work of my skepticism. But he did so by defining memory in terms of maximal recall potential: “If we could remember everything, we wouldn’t have books. Technology is always about helping us out.” And, quickly, the miracle of such enormous computer recall becomes a miracle of computer organization. As Wegener put it, “If I’ve got thirty thousand digital photos that I’ve taken, there’s no way I’m going to sort through them without some help.”

There have been negative responses to the way his invention marshals human memory. Search Twitter for “Timehop” and you’ll find people asserting that “Timehop makes me hate myself” or “Timehop made me cry” because users’ pasts are constantly thrown up at them with a glaring level of fidelity that human memory might have softened. Oh God, moans the unsuspecting user, I really wore
that? I
said
that? It’s common for Wegener to receive requests for an algorithm that would weed out negative content from Timehop’s capsules, but thus far he hasn’t gotten around to it.

The cringe effect was most pronounced in Timehop’s (since abolished) text message feature. For a brief stint, the app would regurgitate year-old text messages for users, in addition to the photos and tweets. These proved too personal, however. Only 2 to 3 percent of users made use of the text message software, and those who did, says Wegener, often hadn’t thought about whom they were texting one year ago: horrible ex-boyfriends and horrible ex-girlfriends. “People just weren’t comfortable with it,” he told me. “They’d contact us in a hurry and want the feature disconnected.”

Wegener himself is deeply committed to lifelogging and feels that “at a deeper level it makes us feel we’re getting more out of life. We’re fighting mortality. If we write everything down, it’ll stay fresh, you know? I mean, we’re being pulled through time against our will toward death. But this can make us feel like we lived.”

He also sees his creation as a potential bonding agent for friends and families. “There’s a subtlety to Timehop that a lot of people don’t pick up on,” he told me. “All our hundreds of thousands of users are reliving the same day at the same time. It’s a movie theater experience—a very collective experience where the record is playing and you can’t stop it. So if your family had a barbecue a year ago, you’re all going to relive that experience at the same time.” But only, of course, if one’s entire family is signed into Timehop. As a terminally forgetful person, I accept that part of me desires the assured and algorithmic narrative such software promises. How much of my hole-filled, personally generated narrative would I do away with if I could replace it with such a happily agreed-upon history?

It would be a wonderful thing if our minds could source such information for us and synchronize our histories so effortlessly. But without our gadgets, the vast majority of our lives actually slips away, never to be heard from again. Sometimes this is a deeply frustrating fact of life. Think of how much we live and how much we lose.

An app like Timehop, meanwhile, doesn’t just remind us what we’ve done, it encourages us to step out of the present and devote more time and energy toward the recording process. Wegener’s team wanted to see what happened to social media activity after users signed up for Timehop, so they monitored usage of Foursquare, an app that lets people “check in” to physical locations around town (a Starbucks, a department store, a restaurant), creating a record of one’s whereabouts over time. The behavior of twenty-two thousand Foursquare users was mapped out—incorporating three months of activity before signing onto Timehop and three months of activity afterward. Fourteen percent of users began checking in twice as often; 39 percent more users began adding comments and photos to their check-ins; check-ins overall bumped up 9 percent. The company’s conclusion: “Timehop makes users better.” When users understood that they were creating not just abstract records but fodder for future reminiscences that would be automatically retrieved in a year’s time, they became more involved and invested in the lifelogging process. Wegener had tapped into a major social media truth: We do it because we’re thinking of our own future as a bundle of anticipated memories. When he and I spoke about his own usage of Timehop, Wegener managed to boil things down to a simple core: “It reaffirms me.”

Is there a nobler reason to reminisce? When I consider the state of my brain’s dusty mechanisms, by contrast, my supposedly miraculous neurons feel like a broken machine, incapable of “reaffirming me” the way Wegener’s app can. I’m a wimp on the beach and my own phone is the jock kicking sand in my face. Is there value, still, in a human memory when a computer’s can surpass it so effortlessly?

How much abler, how much more proficient, seems the miracle of computerized recall. What a relief to rely on the unchanging memory of our machines.

Albert Einstein said we should never memorize anything that we could look up. That’s practical and seemingly good advice. When I off-load my memory to a computer system, I am freed up, I cast off a certain mental drudgery. But what would Einstein have said if he knew how much of our lives, how much of everything,
can be looked up now? Should we ever bother to memorize poetry, or names, or historical facts? What utility would there be in the hazy results? Fifty years from now, if you have an expansive, old-fashioned memory—if you can recite
The Epic of Gilgamesh,
say—are you a wizard or a dinosaur?