At first I was intrigued by the “forgetting and remembering” theory by Tompson that memory plays better in getting the gist rather than in the specific details of what we try to remember. Though the every single detail seldom makes sense of anything that helps us understanding the world. “…but we lose everything else, in particular discarding the details that don’t fit our predetermined biases” (Tompson, 24). What happens to the details we have ignored? Are those details, as well as the gists, of the same importance in helping establish the universe we observe?

Once the details are well kept by technology as part of our memory for lifelong, the memories becomes active and digitalized instead of passive or insignificant. Lifeloggers provide us a glimpse into how to save and use detailed memory in a digital age. Think about this image: if you are in need of some details of a certain event happened in the past, you are able to extract whatever you want from the large amount of the data base created for recording. It seems like your memories never lapse, which sounds really cool to me. In fact the “lifelog” has influenced the world we live to some extent. Apart from the traditional way of writing diary, the website: http://lifelogger.com/ already make it available to record your everyday life by videos. All you need is a smartphone or a camera. On a basic level, the information age offering us various ways to achieve the goal of tracking every fragment in our daily lives has shaped the world we are exploring into.

These personal archiving activities, though seem to have a long way to go, can be perceived to reveal the uniqueness of one’s life. “Collecting was seen as part of a quest for personal meaning” (Cox, 5); “collecting may somehow extend from our desires to survive, connected to the hunting of other essential necessities for sustaining life” (Cox, 3).  In this sense, recording or collecting the details of everyday life does an important role in building up the self-identification. Collections have become firmly related to the memory of socioculture by which the individual impacts on archive reconstruct.

However, the quintessential dilemma is that, though the digital records, including website information, audio and videos, seem to be under the control of the lifeloggers, the fact that nobody can live with incessantly recording every trifle in our daily life is worthy of considering. There will always be sometime that is embarrassing and we are never willing to keep in mind in our lifetime. How can we deal with this kind of awkward situation? Furthermore, since the lifeloggers become a new trend in personal archive, how will privacy security during the data collecting be achieved? Are archive activities going to be a sort of professional expertise or the personal habit out of interest in the future?