It’s an important week this week. The iPhone is released in the US on Friday.
“Nyah. So what?” most of you say, and you might be right.
I have a very strange memory. I don’t mean that I just remembered something strange, but that I cannot predict what I will and will not remember. I’m not sure if I use gadgets to store information because my memory is strange, or if my memory has become strange because of my dependance on these things.
Examples. I cannot remember much of my schooling. I’m not saying that I cannot recall anything in particular right now, but instead that when Kim prompts me with her memories of that period (which are excellent) I cannot recall the majority of those occasions. It’s gone. Johnny Mnemonic style. This is also true of more recent events too, but obviously I can’t give you examples because I can’t remember them.
So one of my favourite gadgets then is my mobile camera, and even more so than my big-arsed digital SLR. With mobile cameras, which might be on my phone, my PDA or my laptop, I can record my memories (I must have around 30,000 photos kicking around by now). I just found a huge folder of images on my hard drive that I’d forgotten about (doh!) that were from mobile phones from a few years ago. I dragged and dropped the whole folder into iPhoto and sat transfixed like Zarkov in Flash Gordon as images of my past flashed by and Jack became smaller and smaller, younger and younger, eventually disappearing from images and being replaced by a very pregnant Kim. Awesome brainwashing. I think I’ll upload a huge number of these tiny images to Flickr, but just for family and close friends to see.
Gadgets are great. Gadgets are helpful. You shouldn’t have to rely on your gadgets, but you should be able to rely on your backups. Hopefully before I even get my hands on an iPhone in early 2008 I’ll already be remotely trawling through my own Flickr repository to remind myself of people, places and events, and I’ll be adding to that repository and to this website, helping build my online memory.
