I’m interested in this idea of forgetting, which Thompson describes as both a “gift and a curse.” He writes, “by chipping away at what we experience in everyday life, we leave behind a sculpture of what’s meaningful to us, even if sometimes it happens to be wrong” (24). On the inverse of this idea is the realization that if we remembered everything—every detail of every moment—our brains would be incapable of discerning anything through the chaos of information. There’s an intentional parallel that Thompson strings through his chapter relating this problematic idea of hypermnesia to the “perfect recall” of the lifeloggers (29). As Thompson describes, sophisticated enough algorithms have not yet been written in order to sort and search the enormous amount of data captured by lifeloggers, which at times renders their comprehensive documentary records useless, or maybe in need of a defined use value.

This all seems obvious to an extent. And so, what struck me in the examples of Deb Roy and Gordon Bell was that in each instance where technology interceded to record and/or fill the role of memory a sense of liberation resulted. Thompson describes Roy watching his son’s first steps as “genuinely lost in the moment, enthralled”(21). And, he writes of Bell: “knowing that there’s a permanent backup of almost everything he reads, sees, or hears allows him to live more in the moment, paying closer attention to what he is doing” (32). I can’t help wonder about how realistic this idea of being freed from the burden of memory really is? And what are its nuances? How much responsibility does one have to turn over to digital record keeping in order to experience the weight of memory lifted from one’s psyche? And is this truly an ideal, since towards the end of “We, The Memorious” Thompson explores the idea of engineering artificial modes of forgetting (42)?

I can feel myself struggling with what seems like a true clash of analog versus digital values. Because there is sense that while a lifelogger might experience a freedom from memory (which even as I write that its seems like a misinterpretation on my part), they may lose the necessary perceptual abilities that the “fear” of memory loss naturally hones in everyone. What does a real time digital back up mean for how we construct our world? If almost everything (encounter/document/moment) is now recordable and therefore replicable, how does that shape what and how we produce? Again this seems like a throwback to Derrida: the act of “archivization produces and as much as it records the event.”

Maybe there’s another way of approaching this question of forgetting as a constructive force. In his essay “Drawn To That Moment” the critic John Berger offers a poignant description of his experience drawing his recently deceased father in his coffin. In addition to elucidating a how we perceive, and how a drawing functions as a collection of moments—the experience of looking—the essay discusses the construction of a drawing in terms similar to our discussion of archives, as a refusal of disappearance. And yet, this refusal comes from a process of construction. The drawing like Berger says “encompasses time,” yet its production comes from the working against time. The digital lifelog seems only to mirror time.