Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hi everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says, you came
Speaker 1: and you gave without taking, but I sent you away.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Volcabama, I'm Joe McCormick, and uh,
Speaker 1: we are taking a break from our discussion about superhero
Speaker 1: movies True Story to have a podcast about really kind
Speaker 1: of broadcasting our lives and the fact that this is
Speaker 1: kind of a thing and it has been a thing
Speaker 1: for a while. Yeah. In our last podcast, we talked
Speaker 1: about surveillance, about how surveillance has been escalating in a
Speaker 1: very rapid way for the past few decades um and
Speaker 1: how that trend is probably going to continue, how we
Speaker 1: should feel about it and what it's going to mean.
Speaker 1: But we should keep in mind that a lot of
Speaker 1: the recording that's going on is not some government or
Speaker 1: even some business with the CCTV camera capturing you without
Speaker 1: you knowing. Yeah, it's your buddy with the smartphone or
Speaker 1: the webcam with a webcam, or your smartphone or your
Speaker 1: Google glass. Yeah, we call this a sue veillance as
Speaker 1: opposed to surveillance. Right, it's not a joke, was true, sue.
Speaker 1: Veillance it is the recording of an activity by someone
Speaker 1: who is actually participating in said activity. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: learning words. This is great, this is actually huge. How
Speaker 1: many photos do people upload to Facebook every day? It's
Speaker 1: like for a month. I think it's three hundred million.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of photos. And so then there's all
Speaker 1: the video. There's seventy two hours of video uploaded to
Speaker 1: YouTube every minute, according to the last update from YouTube,
Speaker 1: which was quite a while ago. It was a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago. It wasn't. No, no, it was several
Speaker 1: months ago, because a couple of years ago they said
Speaker 1: it was right, you're right, yeah, but still it's probably
Speaker 1: more since then. Oh sure, I bet we're I bet
Speaker 1: we're creeping up to the hundred hours per minute. Uh
Speaker 1: you know, a hundred hours worth of video per minute
Speaker 1: passing pretty soon. Yeah that's yeah. Wait, wait, way more
Speaker 1: than any any one human person could possibly consume. It's
Speaker 1: like twelve years of footage per day. Yeah no, and
Speaker 1: it's it's accumulating so quickly there's no way for you
Speaker 1: to be able to catch up. You would never just
Speaker 1: there's not enough hours unless you find some way to
Speaker 1: one make everybody stop and to achieve, if not immortality,
Speaker 1: incredible longevity for you to be able to go through
Speaker 1: and watch everything that's been on YouTube, and a lot
Speaker 1: of that is stuff that people have shot of themselves
Speaker 1: that they want to share. They're either sharing their opinion
Speaker 1: about something or they're creating a an online journal that's
Speaker 1: in video form or a vlog as a lot of
Speaker 1: people like to call it, unless you're Felicia Day, in
Speaker 1: which case you call it a flog. Even even outside
Speaker 1: of that, there's there's Twitter updates, there's Facebook up day,
Speaker 1: It's all of this text that is going into this
Speaker 1: online uh giant world diary. Yeah. Sure, I think our
Speaker 1: last podcast maybe got a little bit darker than we
Speaker 1: meant it to. Uh well, because we should a superhero
Speaker 1: discussion that we right need to get to, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: But what we should have remembered is that there's there's
Speaker 1: this irony, you know, like we want to be recorded.
Speaker 1: People are like, my privacy, you know, and that's real,
Speaker 1: that's not I'm not saying like the need for privacy
Speaker 1: doesn't exist, but at the same time, we have this
Speaker 1: not all of us. Most people have this irresistible urge
Speaker 1: to get recorded and make a mark, to share. I
Speaker 1: mean a lot of I would say a great deal
Speaker 1: of human interaction is all in the sharing of stories.
Speaker 1: Those stories may not be formal stories that have a beginning, middle,
Speaker 1: and end and you know, a narrative structure that you could,
Speaker 1: you know, tear apart in a literature class, but they
Speaker 1: are stories. It could be a story what happened to
Speaker 1: you that morning. It could be something that reminds you
Speaker 1: of something else you you had seen but you know.
Speaker 1: Or it could just be taking events and then framing
Speaker 1: it in such a way where it does form a narrative,
Speaker 1: where whereas someone who was independently observing that may just
Speaker 1: see a sequence of events that doesn't have any particular connection.
Speaker 1: But you, as because of your experience, you can create
Speaker 1: that connection and make it even more compelling. And then
Speaker 1: you have the desire, Hey, I just realized these connections
Speaker 1: between these seemingly disconnected events. I have to share this
Speaker 1: with everybody because it's just cool. Well yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: people have been turning their lives into narratives for hundreds
Speaker 1: of years, I guess even thousands, right, pretty much. Well,
Speaker 1: how long have people been making diaries? Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I would say cave paintings are probably technically sort of
Speaker 1: diary tacular. That's eaten by mammoth today. Good day for
Speaker 1: Ugu was fighting grog for a woman. That's that's typical
Speaker 1: journal entry. That story of Jonathan strictly Actually, that was
Speaker 1: on my live journal. That was that was something I
Speaker 1: wrote three years ago. Actually. And an interesting historical point
Speaker 1: is that back before the late nineteenth century, really back
Speaker 1: before the twentieth century period, um diaries were a lot
Speaker 1: less personal. It wasn't really until uh Freudian psychology, the
Speaker 1: popularization of the novel, and the profession of journalism that
Speaker 1: we really started to have this concrete sense of a
Speaker 1: personal identity and a personal self that deserved the kind
Speaker 1: of attention that we give it through these diaries and
Speaker 1: and so. But before people would would get together, friends
Speaker 1: and family would get together and read each other's diaries
Speaker 1: as a way of sharing what was going on in
Speaker 1: their lives, which is kind of unheard of these days.
Speaker 1: I mean, diaries are supposed to be this very private,
Speaker 1: very personal thing right up until you start putting it
Speaker 1: on Twitter or live journal or etcetera. Raise your hand
Speaker 1: if you or a sibling had one of those diaries
Speaker 1: with a little lock on it, yea, or well, and
Speaker 1: those things are so easy to pry apart. But Joe
Speaker 1: has been burned before. That's what we're trying to say.
Speaker 1: All you need is a crowbar and and a little
Speaker 1: bit of elbow grease and the desire to see it done. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there is this this sort of for a lot
Speaker 1: of people, this desire to to record and to share
Speaker 1: their observations, the things that happened to them, really their
Speaker 1: life story. And technology has given us more tools to
Speaker 1: do that now than we've ever had access to before,
Speaker 1: to the point where we're getting closer and closer to
Speaker 1: a time when we could have our entire lives documented
Speaker 1: from birth to death. Yeah, did people ever try to
Speaker 1: do this just in writing like a standard diary? How
Speaker 1: close could you get? The answer is yes, there there
Speaker 1: there are several people. Um it's called a obsessive obsessive
Speaker 1: diary writing or obsessive diaryists. And uh, there's one terrific
Speaker 1: example of a of a Mr of a Reverend Robert Shields,
Speaker 1: who was a reverend teacher and Washington State wrote three
Speaker 1: to six thousand words per day for over twenty years,
Speaker 1: a total of thirty seven point five million words over
Speaker 1: the course of his lifetime. He had six typewriters arranged
Speaker 1: in a horseshoe around a swivel chair and would just
Speaker 1: sit down and and circulate amongst the typewriters until they
Speaker 1: ran out of ribbon um. And this was I mean,
Speaker 1: he was recording things in five minute increments um that
Speaker 1: there was a terrific story in an NPR about it,
Speaker 1: and you know, things things like a twelve twelve twenty
Speaker 1: five I stripped to my thermals. I always do that.
Speaker 1: Twelve thirty to twelve fifty. I eight left over Sam
Speaker 1: and Alaska read salmon by Bumblebee about seven ounces, drank
Speaker 1: ten ounces of orange juice while I read the Oxford
Speaker 1: Dictionary of Quotations. I could keep going spectacular. The fact
Speaker 1: that he always does that, Why did he did he
Speaker 1: only report it once or did he reported every day
Speaker 1: every day? Do you know? Now here's the question, though,
Speaker 1: do you know if he did this intentionally for public
Speaker 1: consumption or was he doing it just or his own reasons?
Speaker 1: He was doing it for his own private reasons. He
Speaker 1: um well, he was. He was born in nineteen eighteen.
Speaker 1: His father happened to be a speed typing champion, UM
Speaker 1: who could type the Gettysburg address over and over at
Speaker 1: two and twenty two words per minute. That break in
Speaker 1: question Quarty keyboard or Dvorak or what I'm guessing it
Speaker 1: has to be Quarty if you're talking nineteen eighteen. Yeah, okay, sorry,
Speaker 1: I do not have personal data. To be fair, there
Speaker 1: were other keyboards early early on in the typewriters, just
Speaker 1: the Quarty one is the one that ended up catching on, right,
Speaker 1: I'll look into it and get back to Yes. He
Speaker 1: he started a diary at the age of seventeen, but
Speaker 1: gave it up, lost interest in it, and then uh
Speaker 1: and then yeah, when he was I guess what, in
Speaker 1: his fifties or sixties. At some point he started this um,
Speaker 1: this obsessive diary. He he said that he didn't know
Speaker 1: why he was doing it, he just did and he
Speaker 1: just had to, and that the thought of stopping it
Speaker 1: would be like turning off his life. Yeah. So, I
Speaker 1: don't know if y'all have ever kept a journal or
Speaker 1: a diary, but it's really interesting the way that writing
Speaker 1: down your experiences can help give them a sense of meaning.
Speaker 1: What was before just something that happened to you takes
Speaker 1: on a kind of symbolic or narrative significance when you
Speaker 1: put put it to words, and and historically speaking, even
Speaker 1: very mundane accounts like these could be very interesting, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, they're they're they're pretty boring to
Speaker 1: read them right now, But in two hundred years and
Speaker 1: four hundred years, that material is gold because we have
Speaker 1: so little information about what was going on at that
Speaker 1: time aside from these written diaries. Oh yeah, that's totally true.
Speaker 1: I mean if we just had access to a few
Speaker 1: totally mundane records of daily life from say ancient Sumeria,
Speaker 1: I mean, how fascinating would that be now, right right,
Speaker 1: especially people that were involved in large world changing events
Speaker 1: and in wars and politics, and in in spectacular events
Speaker 1: and disasters. I'm just thinking, it's been a quiet week
Speaker 1: in ancient sumer my homeland, s Sumeia if he's Samaria.
Speaker 1: But I'm going with the prey home companion approach. Oh
Speaker 1: I see secular thing? No, yeah, I get it? Or
Speaker 1: or would it be you know, just as someone sitting there,
Speaker 1: like like like this guy just going like, like I
Speaker 1: took some temperature readings across my house over the course
Speaker 1: of today. Would you like to hear all of them?
Speaker 1: The paper answers yes. And like I said, we we've
Speaker 1: developed technology now that really makes us even easier. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One thing that occurred to me, and I'm sure there
Speaker 1: are people who are maybe art philosophers or somebody who
Speaker 1: commented on this, but it seems to me that by
Speaker 1: recording something you kind of imbue it with a significance
Speaker 1: in the same way that you did by putting it
Speaker 1: to words, by writing down your experiences. There's something magic
Speaker 1: that happens there. And it's similar when you take a
Speaker 1: picture or record it something, or even or even just
Speaker 1: live streaming where you're not recording it but you know
Speaker 1: someone else is watching, which I can't. I'm not one
Speaker 1: of those people. I don't. I don't have of camera
Speaker 1: on me all the time. That's stream me my my
Speaker 1: mundane activities out to the internet. But as an actor,
Speaker 1: as someone who gets up on stage and performs in
Speaker 1: front of the audiences, live audiences, I mean part of
Speaker 1: the reason why I do that. I'm not saying this
Speaker 1: is for all actors, but for my own personal reasons
Speaker 1: is that there's this sense of validation that comes from someone, Yeah,
Speaker 1: being reacting to something that you are doing and knowing
Speaker 1: that that reaction is affecting someone gives you that sort
Speaker 1: of sense of satisfaction and validation. I expect, I suspect
Speaker 1: rather that some of the people who are life casting
Speaker 1: get a similar kind of sense of validation from that.
Speaker 1: So these days what is life casting involved. Well, before
Speaker 1: we get into what these days what it involves, we
Speaker 1: need to kind of talk about the beginning of what
Speaker 1: life casting was. Yeah, where did they come from and
Speaker 1: how did people How do people get to doing this?
Speaker 1: I would argue that it originally sort of got a
Speaker 1: shot in the arm back in nineteen seventy three, So
Speaker 1: this is pre web obviously by a couple of decades.
Speaker 1: Nineteen seventy three, that's when PBS premiered a show called
Speaker 1: All an American Family. An American Family was a precursor
Speaker 1: to reality television. It followed the on PPS and it
Speaker 1: followed the life of an American family, and cameras were everywhere,
Speaker 1: and it was uh. There was some criticism that that
Speaker 1: it wasn't a perfectly natural kind of setting, which is
Speaker 1: the case whenever I think you put cameras and I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's starting to get to the point where cameras
Speaker 1: everywhere is natural. So I would argue that we're getting
Speaker 1: to a point where you could do a reality television
Speaker 1: show where the fact that cameras are there is not
Speaker 1: actually making it artificial. But now if you have a
Speaker 1: big crew there, who is standing there behind the cameras
Speaker 1: and monitors and saying that argument was great, but we
Speaker 1: missed the end. Could you do the same argument again,
Speaker 1: that's not so natural. But anyway, well, there's also still
Speaker 1: be a difference I think between people who know they're
Speaker 1: being recorded and maybe a few people are watching versus
Speaker 1: people who know they're being recorded and they know a
Speaker 1: million b right right. If you know that you're doing
Speaker 1: it for an audience, then you're going to behave differently
Speaker 1: than you would otherwise. Really depends on what kind of
Speaker 1: psychopath you are, I think, because the kind of psychopath
Speaker 1: I am, I don't I don't change if it's if
Speaker 1: it's one person watching or one million. I'm still psych
Speaker 1: That's why I'm an actor. Uh yeah. And then there
Speaker 1: were other movies that came out that like Real Life,
Speaker 1: which was a comedy that was spoofing this sort of stuff. Uh. There,
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about one of my favorite movies
Speaker 1: of all time, which also kind of ties into this
Speaker 1: idea of reality reality show and turning your life into
Speaker 1: a type of entertainment for other people. That film would
Speaker 1: be Shock Treatment, which is the spiritual sequel to Rocky
Speaker 1: Horror Picture Show. It involves several of the characters. Brad
Speaker 1: and Janet are the two main characters in Shock Treatment. Uh.
Speaker 1: Interesting little side note, there's only one actor in both
Speaker 1: Rocky Horror and Shock Treatment who is playing the same character.
Speaker 1: That's your dough Brian No. Richard O'Brien is in both movies,
Speaker 1: but he's not playing the same character. He's riff raff
Speaker 1: in uh in Rocky Horror, and he's McKinley in Shock Treatment.
Speaker 1: Though the only actor who plays the same character, I
Speaker 1: don't even know the actor's name. I know the character's
Speaker 1: name is Ralph Hapschatt, who in Rocky Horror is the
Speaker 1: guy who's getting married. At the very beginning of the movie,
Speaker 1: Brad and jenetor are going to a wedding, and the
Speaker 1: wedding is between Betty Monroe and Ralph hap chat and
Speaker 1: the actor who played Ralph is the same guy in
Speaker 1: both movies, and he plays Ralph, and yeah, well, the
Speaker 1: the thing about Shock Treatment is that it all takes
Speaker 1: place in Denton, and Denton is a town that's just
Speaker 1: a giant television studio, and so there's a studio audience
Speaker 1: that's watching everything that happens. And so the lives of
Speaker 1: Brad and Janet as they play out in the movie
Speaker 1: are being observed by a live studio audience that's reacting
Speaker 1: to the stuff that's going on during the course of
Speaker 1: the film. So it's this kind of idea. And again
Speaker 1: this is before any real reality shows that come out
Speaker 1: the sides of the PBS uh experiment that had come
Speaker 1: out in seventy three. Uh, And this is the kind
Speaker 1: of stuff that started to get people into thinking, hey,
Speaker 1: how could we you know, use this and make an
Speaker 1: entertainment out of it. Meanwhile, Uh, once we get into
Speaker 1: the nineties, you get into the rise of the Internet
Speaker 1: in the world Wide Web. Now, the Internet had been
Speaker 1: around for a while, but the Worldwide Web is what
Speaker 1: made it really accessible to the average person. On top
Speaker 1: of that, we started seeing things like digital cameras and
Speaker 1: when digital cameras became more and more common, and then
Speaker 1: we could get into the point where we had webcams
Speaker 1: that could take a picture every you know, minute or
Speaker 1: three minutes or whatever and then upload it. Because back
Speaker 1: then the broadband speeds were such that unless you were
Speaker 1: at a university and had a dedicated line, uh, you
Speaker 1: didn't really have the speed the throughput necessary to upload
Speaker 1: digital streaming video. You can also, no one would have
Speaker 1: had this speed to download it. I had to watch it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the early earliest lifecasting was really just a bunch
Speaker 1: of webcams that were um position around various people's homes
Speaker 1: that would take a photo every few minutes and then
Speaker 1: upload it. And so you would go to the person's
Speaker 1: website and then refresh the page, or the page with
Speaker 1: itself would refresh every few minutes and give you an
Speaker 1: updated view of what had happened in the the um
Speaker 1: in that person's home. Now, this kind of stuff was
Speaker 1: sort of mentioned in a novel that was written by
Speaker 1: a pretty famous science fiction author, William Gibson neuromancer fame.
Speaker 1: So Gibson had talked about a concept called God's Little Toys,
Speaker 1: and he took that actually from something that our friend
Speaker 1: of william S Burrows said about a real to reel
Speaker 1: tape machine, the idea that this is God's little Toys.
Speaker 1: It's something that you could record thoughts and in playback
Speaker 1: whenever you wanted. But in his his novel All Tomorrow's Parties,
Speaker 1: God's Little Toys were these blimps that could follow a
Speaker 1: person around and stream everything so that it was con
Speaker 1: stantly broadcasting that person's life and became a record of
Speaker 1: that person's life as they moved around. Uh So that
Speaker 1: kind of idea filtered into reality once we get into
Speaker 1: the nineties and we start with these webcams. Some of
Speaker 1: the earliest people who some of the people who did
Speaker 1: this first, this this idea of life casting, of broadcasting
Speaker 1: their lives include uh Jennifer Ringley who started Jenny Cam.
Speaker 1: So Jenny Cam went from about two four and she
Speaker 1: had cameras up and would upload it was was uploading
Speaker 1: pictures of her life every single day. She did her
Speaker 1: best to have it running all the time. Uh. Steve
Speaker 1: Mann was another early life caster and then by n
Speaker 1: SO nine four nine six is when we start seeing
Speaker 1: lifecasting get started. Ninety nine that's when it really started
Speaker 1: to hit the public consciousness, this idea of people's lives
Speaker 1: being broadcast for entertainment, because that is when in the
Speaker 1: Netherlands a television show called Big Brother hit there, and
Speaker 1: Big Brother, you know, it was all about throwing people together.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like Real World that MTV had done
Speaker 1: in the way, but it was it was throwing a
Speaker 1: bunch of people together and seeing what happens, kind of
Speaker 1: like just starting an ant farm, but with people and
Speaker 1: then shaking it really good, just before the cameras start
Speaker 1: rolling picking really controversial ants fight exactly. Yeah, and and yeah,
Speaker 1: in a little bit more of a contained area than
Speaker 1: in the real world, right, And and there are people
Speaker 1: out there who still do quite a bit of streaming.
Speaker 1: Some of them are life casting with wearable computers, are
Speaker 1: wearable UM cameras, where it's more about capturing their point
Speaker 1: of view as opposed to the camera being turned back
Speaker 1: on themselves. It's more about them capturing everything that's happening
Speaker 1: to them from their perspective, which is the concept of
Speaker 1: Google Glass. Well, that's one thing Google glass is capable
Speaker 1: of doing. Yeah, And if I can interject, I think
Speaker 1: that's sort of the future trend. I think that's where
Speaker 1: this is going, is not so much turning the camera
Speaker 1: on yourself for the I think I see it. I
Speaker 1: see it as sort of red from your point of view.
Speaker 1: I think you're gonna have both because I think that
Speaker 1: vlogging is still very much a thing. There are people
Speaker 1: who feel that they have uh, something very specific to
Speaker 1: say about various topics, and so they want to turn
Speaker 1: that camera back on themselves and record themselves saying, you know,
Speaker 1: why we should leave Brittany alone or whatever, right, And
Speaker 1: then there are going to be the other folks who
Speaker 1: are thinking, uh, you know, I just want the world
Speaker 1: to kind of see what it's like to go through
Speaker 1: life in my shoes. So I think we're gonna get
Speaker 1: both types. Still, I don't I don't see one dominating
Speaker 1: over the other. I do see that the perspective stuff
Speaker 1: is going to jump in popularity simply because the technology
Speaker 1: is going to make it easier to do it well.
Speaker 1: And I'd also like to make a very important distinction
Speaker 1: between the future of life casting people uh taping everything
Speaker 1: that happens in broad casting it versus just plane recording
Speaker 1: just personal her personally. I mean you said that shields
Speaker 1: the diarist like he didn't necessarily plan to publish this
Speaker 1: right right in fact, and let me scroll to find
Speaker 1: maybe he actually he UM He donated all of his
Speaker 1: diaries to Washington Washington State University. This was posthumously and
Speaker 1: um under under the agreement that it would not be
Speaker 1: read or subjected to a word count for fifty years. Wow. Huh,
Speaker 1: But I mean, well, that's interesting. I mean so, so
Speaker 1: I think that tells us something that we sort of
Speaker 1: knew already is that there's clearly some personal value that
Speaker 1: people could get out of recording their experiences even without
Speaker 1: broadcasting them out to the world. And those seem like
Speaker 1: two very different ways of approaching recording one's life. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and there there's been a whole bunch of scientific research
Speaker 1: lately about UM about in in in health tracking, fitness tracking,
Speaker 1: just making yourself aware of your habits and aware of
Speaker 1: what you're doing. In psychology as well, people who who
Speaker 1: are working through issues and keep a diary about it
Speaker 1: end up having much better UM or maybe it's significantly
Speaker 1: better at anyway results at the end. Yeah. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: idea that that it's we we talk about this a
Speaker 1: lot as well. With the reliance upon the internet to
Speaker 1: do a lot of the heavy lifting for us these days,
Speaker 1: things like we don't have to remember as many facts
Speaker 1: as we used to because we've put that into our
Speaker 1: phones or on our computers and uh, but when you
Speaker 1: write it down, you're actively thinking about it as you're
Speaker 1: writing it, and then you have that personal record of it,
Speaker 1: not just you know, not just a Wikipedia entry that
Speaker 1: tells you about whatever the thing was that you were
Speaker 1: thinking about. Has your own personal perspective on there. I
Speaker 1: think that really does. Even if it's just a ritual
Speaker 1: type thing, it really does have a way of cementing
Speaker 1: that and making it have more of a psychological significance
Speaker 1: in your life. Um. You know, I'm not a big
Speaker 1: journal keeper. I never have been, but I've I've used
Speaker 1: them before to write down funny things that I've thought
Speaker 1: about or observed, but not so much of my deepest
Speaker 1: thoughts and feelings about stuff. I just have never been
Speaker 1: that kind of Your experiences are washed away like tears
Speaker 1: in rain. Well, it's probably for the best, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I destroy everything I touched, Joe, and uh,
Speaker 1: I don't want to look back at a wake of destruction.
Speaker 1: I just don't. Well, I've seen attack chips on fire.
Speaker 1: I've seen what seabeams glittering san hazard, gay little blade runner. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like how Yeah, well no, let me grab it here. Um.
Speaker 1: I I have sometimes kept journals on and off throughout
Speaker 1: my life, not a whole lot recently, um, but there
Speaker 1: have been times when I did, and it definitely it
Speaker 1: changes the way you live when you're when you're keeping
Speaker 1: records of things. I mean by down a memory, you
Speaker 1: take an experience and you make it knowledge. Um. Like
Speaker 1: we were saying before, you kind of you imbue it
Speaker 1: with symbolic meaning just by putting it towards You do
Speaker 1: the same thing by recording it, you know, whether audio
Speaker 1: or video. But what about you, Lauren? Um? I I
Speaker 1: actually kept diaries daily as a child. I mean dozens
Speaker 1: and dozens of these diaries, and they were lost a
Speaker 1: few years ago when when my father moved and he
Speaker 1: was sending me, mailing me all of my possessions from
Speaker 1: from my childhood. They were lost in the mail. And
Speaker 1: this is still this shattering thing to me because because
Speaker 1: I was writing down all of these deeply personal things
Speaker 1: that I always thought that I would have a written
Speaker 1: record of, and suddenly I don't, um, what creep has
Speaker 1: them now that too. But and then for a long
Speaker 1: time I did have a live journal, and so that
Speaker 1: was kind of an extension of that. Um but uh,
Speaker 1: but yeah, no, not not so much. Lately, I've kind
Speaker 1: of given up on it. It's it's mostly I mean,
Speaker 1: sometimes I'll go back and look through my text messages
Speaker 1: to my friends if I want to see what was
Speaker 1: going on at a particular time or or yeah, or
Speaker 1: I'll scroll through Facebook and see what was going on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've done that too. Um. Yeah, when I go back
Speaker 1: and read my old I had a live journal too,
Speaker 1: I didn't just a lot of weeping, not a lot
Speaker 1: of weeping. I actually read it over and I think,
Speaker 1: I don't even remember being this person anymore. It's it's
Speaker 1: almost like there there are times where I read things
Speaker 1: that I've written that were funny, and I think, man,
Speaker 1: I was really funny back then. What happened to I
Speaker 1: do that all the time. I have zero recollection of
Speaker 1: writing these things. I mean, I remember feeling the way
Speaker 1: that I was feeling at the time, but the actual
Speaker 1: words that happened, I have no idea. Oh yeah, I've
Speaker 1: felt the same way. Um. It's amazing to me to
Speaker 1: think of though, I mean, if we were to make
Speaker 1: that more total, like imagine you are really recording your
Speaker 1: whole life and not necessarily broadcasting it, but just for
Speaker 1: your own purposes. I think I just can't imagine. And really,
Speaker 1: I mean, how different would life be if you had
Speaker 1: a record of everything. Imagine you had something like Google
Speaker 1: Glass and you could just set it to record constantly
Speaker 1: and so every conversation you had, everything you did, everything
Speaker 1: was available to you totally on on recall. You just
Speaker 1: had to go back, rewind and find it and and
Speaker 1: even from the point you know, but but before you
Speaker 1: put on those that that Google glass and you start recording, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I wonder what's going to happen with children
Speaker 1: who have been born in the past five years of
Speaker 1: of of digital photography, because you know, I mean, are
Speaker 1: I'm sure that all of us here have friends who
Speaker 1: have just ten billion pictures of their very adorable, precious
Speaker 1: children on the internet. And you know, what's what's it
Speaker 1: going to be like? You know, we we all have
Speaker 1: a few tattered black and white photos or maybe not
Speaker 1: black and white, but you know, terrible chroma color from
Speaker 1: our childhoods. And these these kids are going to have
Speaker 1: this second to second documentation. I just have wood carvings.
Speaker 1: But just imagine, let's project it out for a few years.
Speaker 1: And just mentioned that you are able to to record
Speaker 1: pretty much your entire life and store it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not that hard to imagine. It doesn't seem infeasible
Speaker 1: at all. And you can just imagine taking your kids
Speaker 1: and saying, hey, I want to show you this, and
Speaker 1: you show your kids the moment that you and your
Speaker 1: spouse met and say this is this is it. This
Speaker 1: is when we met one another and everything was magical.
Speaker 1: You could essentially, yeah, you could essentially recreate how I
Speaker 1: met your mother, but you know, in real life, uh,
Speaker 1: and and show them like, this is this is why
Speaker 1: we got married. Well, so many of the most important
Speaker 1: moments in our lives are totally unpredictable and spontaneous. Sure,
Speaker 1: you don't have time to turn on a camera exactly,
Speaker 1: or if you did turn on a camera, you would
Speaker 1: have missed out on what it was that was happened.
Speaker 1: It would have been weird. If you're like, getting let
Speaker 1: me document this now. I mean, having just an ambient
Speaker 1: recording gives you the ability to um to experience life
Speaker 1: and not worry about trying to capture it, but knowing
Speaker 1: that if something happens that you want to remember, it
Speaker 1: will be available to you, which is a big criticism
Speaker 1: of the of the kind of life blogging or life
Speaker 1: capture that's happening right now, and that you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: how many times have you come to a concert and
Speaker 1: you see more people watching it through their cell phone
Speaker 1: than actually watching the stage, and and it kills you
Speaker 1: a little bit inside. You go like you're missing the experience.
Speaker 1: That's also one of the reasons why Google was very
Speaker 1: interested in Google Glass, because they hope that it would
Speaker 1: bring you that much closer to just experiencing what's going
Speaker 1: on around you in real time, while also capturing everything
Speaker 1: from your point of view. But you don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about it because it's just doing it on its
Speaker 1: own well once once you tell it to record, it's
Speaker 1: not like it's always recording, although that is a fear
Speaker 1: some people have. I think there is an interesting psychological
Speaker 1: distinction between, um, between having an experience and making memories
Speaker 1: of that experience, Like they're two different modes you get
Speaker 1: into right sure, um, but this this sort of consolidates them,
Speaker 1: right Yeah, And and I tell you. Let me. Let
Speaker 1: me tell you what I'm most looking forward to and
Speaker 1: the few future with this kind of technology. What I'm
Speaker 1: most looking forward to is the fact that when my
Speaker 1: wife tells me I said something, and I know I
Speaker 1: didn't say that, but she tells me I said that,
Speaker 1: we can actually go back and look at the right.
Speaker 1: I am never wrong. I am never wrong, and in
Speaker 1: the video will prove it once we have that technology.
Speaker 1: She remembers things that happened in an alternate universe asitive. Well,
Speaker 1: I can't wait to see how this pans out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't be either. Well, guys, I think this wraps
Speaker 1: up our conversation about life casting. If you have any
Speaker 1: suggestions for topics that we should cover here on Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: please get in touch with us. Let us know what
Speaker 1: you think. Tell us what you're excites you about the future.
Speaker 1: What is it that you really want to hear us
Speaker 1: talk about we can You can get in touch with
Speaker 1: us using our email. We have FW thinking at Discovery
Speaker 1: dot com that works to get to all three of us.
Speaker 1: You can also get in touch with us by going
Speaker 1: to f W thinking dot com. Check out the website,
Speaker 1: go watch the videos, read up on the blog posts.
Speaker 1: Our social media links are there. You can get in
Speaker 1: touch with us on Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus.
Speaker 1: We're eager to hear from you. We can't wait for
Speaker 1: you to be part of the conversation, and we will
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. For more on this
Speaker 1: topic and the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot Com,
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