Adam Greenfield asked that question with some well-considered (and written) thoughts the other day about moblogging, inspired by meeting moblogger Mie Kennedy at the Tokyo Blogger’s party last week. Somehow Adam manages to be both euphoric and sobering in the same article:
Right now, Mie, alongside a few vanguard others like her, is tasting the first intoxicating moments of being able to live what is nothing other than an annotated life. All the early signs point to this helping those who so choose to live lives of almost unimaginably rich detail and texture by the standards of the ones who came before us – but I have to ask if we’ll ever come to believe that the hyperexamined life is one not worth living. As usual, perhaps, there are more questions than answers, and the only thing for it is to press ahead with open eyes and see where this wave deposits us.
Also in his piece is an echo of something I heard Adam tell me at the same shindig: “We are the first generation to have this ability to stop time and immediately semantically mark it up for later retrieval and cross-referencing […].” And earlier, this admonishment: “if the files are marked up properly!” I find myself worrying about this constantly now, every day that goes by I feel a slight anxious pull that I haven’t yet attended to this, nor even begun the research. Perhaps it’s an anxiety brought on in part by coming life, and the soon dawning of this entity’s own (his/her)story, and how that story will exist for the most part in the floating land of bytes and pixels and deteriorating storage media, to say nothing of the tangled protocols and conflicting standards. I want the story, the life, to be grounded, bodily, corporeal, yet the tools with which to document and record, let alone to retrieve and cross-reference, that story are day by day increasingly becoming ephemeral, and immaterial. Immaterial in the “having no material body or form” (American Heritage) sense of the word. But can the “of no importance or relevance; inconsequential or irrelevant” sense be far behind?
