Borges, lifelogging, and the web
Interesting convergence: On Sunday, NPR’s On the Media did a segment on Gordon Bell’s "lifelogging" project, and the consequences for human memory of keeping a digital record of everything one does. Interestingly, Clive Thompson, the second interviewee in the segment, mentioned both the potential for catastrophic loss of data (if your hard drive is your externalized memory for everything, you have to be extra-paranoid about backing everything up), and some research that suggests that lifelogging can actually help amnesics rebuild their memories. It’s an interesting segment, and gets nicely at the ways memory and forgetting always seem to imply and implicate each other.
Then a couple of days ago, the New York Times ran a piece on Jorge Luis Borges as a prefigurer of the internet. Among the comparisons they drew: lifelogging and the infinite, indelible memory of Ireneo Funes in "Funes the Memorious." Which strikes me as right on-target, though I think Tlön is as much like Second Life as it is like Wikipedia (the NYT’s analogy).
And it turns out William Gibson wrote the introduction for the new edition of Labyrinths, New Directions’ collection of Borges’s stories. I may have to get a copy to sit next to my old, battered, much-loved copy of Labyrinths.
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