Jim Lewis wrote a short analysis for the February 2003 issue of Wired which looks at the implications of ever-increasing hard drives sizes to the point where people start archiving almost everything related to their lives. Lewis writes,
If you wanted to, you could make a fair-quality audio recording of everything that reaches your ears for a month and store it on an iPod that fits in your pocket. Though, of course, you’d need another month to listen to it. Whence the rub: If life gets recorded in real time, it hardly counts as a record at all. It certainly has less impact, and in extreme examples it’s self defeating.
Lewis notes that the same sort of problem applies to the large amounts of recorded video, photographs, and other media that is increasingly being generated digitally (and much of what is not is being converted to one digital format or another).
But what I think Lewis fails to realize is that as our ability to store things digitally has increased, so has our ability to manage digital media — and such software will only continue to improve.
Part of the solution is to tag everything with metadata and use the metadata to organize the information. I’m very impressed with two applications I use to accomplish that task.
Conversant, of course, is the groupware system that drives this website and makes it easy to quickly tag everything I write with metadata and then organize the various articles into sensible (to me at least) topical pages.
Another program I’m very impressed with is Adobe’s recently released Photoshop Album which makes it easy and fast to quickly tag hundreds and even thousands of photographs with metadata and then find photographs that match the various tags.
The other part of the solution will be using increased computer power and other advances to have our computer systems more effectively highlight things of interest. Photoshop Album, for example, has an interesting option to select one picture and the find other pictures with similar color patterns. It works relatively well considering how crude of a search criteria it is using. Such tools will only get more powerful over time.
So, no, an audio recording of everything that your ear hears isn’t particularly useful yet. But when I can tell it to bring up all conversations with my supervisor over the last month or, even better, all recordings with my daughter in which she is singing, then things get really interesting.