Welcome to 2008, everybody. I’m not sure how your year began, but ours started with an inaugural dance party in the sleet.
Bob and Brooke are welcoming us to the new year with a clip of Chris Matthews freaking out about the results of the Iowa caucus. Which is not newsworthy. Chris Matthews is always freaking out about something. The whole epsiode is similarly bland and uneventful.
Apparently, in the new year, there’s more to freak out about than the presidential election. As we find out later in the episode, we eat like crap and there may be no new TV, indefinitely.
But even more terrifying than the prospect of never seeing my beloved “Mad Men” again is the thought of Life Logging.
After a brief porn music interlude, Brooke introduces Gordon Bell, a software developer for Microsoft who is in the process of developing something called life logging. It’s the practice of keeping every tiny detail of one’s personal life stored on a hard drive. Dude is keeping track of every coffee cup and receipt, even going so far as to wear a camera around his neck that snaps a picture every minute.
He takes all of these things and stores them on a hard drive, which serves as kind of a second brain. The logic is that a perfect memory preserved on a hard drive can supplement the imperfect memory of a real brain. Bell admits that he depends on his system, but he can quit. He can quit any time he wants.
Though there are benefits (think of the way it could help amnesia patients), life logging is kinda creepy.
I don’t think I could ever do it - there are days that I want to forget, and there are definitely things in my past that I don’t ever want to think about again. Also, I kinda don’t want to see anyone else’s life log.
It seems like the quest to try to remember everything would get in the way of actually living. It seems like it would be an incredible distraction. Also, as the software developer notes, if one’s hard drive were to crash, it could be entirely psychologically devastating.
In other news, Bob seems to be on his best behavior this week. I wonder if something happened over the holiday that he’d rather forget. Or, maybe I was wrong about his raging crush. It could have just been a general sense of holiday goodwill towards everyone (especially Brooke).
Posted by Kerry, edited by Matthew.
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