Why I Decided to Write This Blog
For a few years now, I’ve had a recurring obsession with recording a time lapse of my life. I initially thought, quite vainly, I must be the first person to have ever thought of such a thing, but Steve Mann was way ahead of me. He was tinkering away on his wearable camera as early as the 1970s. In fact, if you read Gordon Bell’s book Total Recall, which I’m now doing, you’ll find that Vannevar Bush thought of the idea back even earlier than that, back in the 1940s as part of his “Memex” system.
Life Magazine depiction of Memex wearable camera.
This obsession with continuous visual recording comes and goes. I’m a dilettante by nature. I don’t possess the technical wherewithal to build anything nearly so functional as Steve Mann’s camera. I’m also a bit more of a conformist than he is. I wouldn’t like the social ridicule that comes with wearing such a Borg-like contraption.
Actually, I think I’d prefer capturing a time lapse of my life via the multiple cameras that are already all around but not on me (like the one watching me type this on my laptop monitor, or the one in my pocket that’s part of my iPhone, and so on), plus a few IP cameras that I deliberately set up. The visual output from such a system of cameras, plus the GPS, weather and other metadata I would append might someday become a feature of this blog.
Anyway, I’m digressing. I’ve long had an obsession about this sort of thing, but then another event strengthened this obsession, an event I thought wholly unrelated at the time. When it came time to move from Singapore to Bangkok, I decided I couldn’t bear to move the big, ugly, black, steel filing cabinet that contains all of our financial records again. I’d just moved it 18 months before from Los Angeles. Besides, its contents were horribly disorganized. One whole drawer functioned more or less as a swimming pool of loose receipts.
I read up on the IRS rules for digitizing documents. I bought a well reviewed scanner (the Fujitsu ScanSnap 300m); I bought a well-reviewed document management system (DMS) called DEVONTthink; and I set about scanning everything I could (I’m still scanning months later, well after the move — it takes a very long time, even with a fast, duplex scanner) and piping the resulting masses of PDF files into DEVONThink.
I started off doing all this just to get rid of the ugly filing cabinet and to get organized. I didn’t expect it to be fun. And I certainly, didn’t expect it to be an emotional experience, but oddly enough it was an emotional experience. Very much so.
I hadn’t counted on how much of your personal life narrative is hidden in your financial numbers. Once you’ve scanned, say, 10 years worth of your bank statements into a DMS, and once that system has run optical character recognition (OCR) pass over all those documents so you can search them like you now search Google every day, there’s the potential for recovering a lot of life’s memories. You remember vividly the apartment you briefly lived in way out in the San Fernando Valley. You hosted some fun parties there. You remember the engagement that didn’t work out (boy, did that cost you). You remember the week in Barcelona with two coworkers (lots of Gaudi and cava there!). Your mind boggles and the grand total you’ve spent at Starbucks. And on and on.
This all provoke wistfulness too. God, time passes quickly.
Then the impulse hit to start digitizing more and more of my life (all the photos, the moldering video tapes, all the longhand journals, all the memorabilia). The scanning project evolved into something like a stand against the ephemerality of life. It started out in part out of fear of an IRS audit and turned into a project to digitally capture as much of my past self as I possibly could, so I could relive it, make sense of it, revel in the surprising connections and patterns within it, and perhaps eventually share the previously unrecalled richness of my personal experiences with others.
The exact same yearning is behind the recurring obsession with making a visual time lapse of my life. It’s just a thought experiment at this point, but it’s the same sort of stand against the ephemerality of life.
