[req] Perfect Recall

I have a big pro­blem with kee­ping track of the media I con­sume. With all the albums I down­load and lis­ten to, and all the shit I read online, I’m oppres­sed by this fee­ling that it’s all just run­ning through me without being diges­ted or pro­ces­sed. It’s over-stimulation, I end up with all this shit in my head that I don’t know what to do with. I could of course just limit my intake, but I’m addic­ted to media and I don’t feel like chan­ging any time soon. Plus there’s got to be a way I can apply all this stuff.

I sup­pose tra­di­tio­nally that’s what the blog for­mat is meant for, to just kind of shit out everything you con­sume in the form of links and video embeds. But really that’s more like just “taking notes” at a lec­ture with a cas­sette recor­der, see what I mean? That’s just transc­rip­tion. I need something to do with it all. This pro­blem is addres­sed to some extent by my meti­cu­lous music library cura­tion with foo­bar, and my des­pe­rate calls recently for some­body to improve on the way we manage our music.

I think a pre­vai­ling pro­blem is that of linea­rity; I can write a post on here, then another post, then another, and they appear chro­no­lo­gi­cally in a line. Tag­ging and cate­go­ri­zing helps to make the con­tent on here a little less linear, but it’s still not satisf­ying enough. I mean what I want is to be able to have some very loose, scrapbook-y inter­face where I can just kind of swim through colla­ges of things: albums, jour­nal entries. Snapshots of various aspects of cer­tain time-periods. Paper is free-form enough to serve a pur­pose like this, but note­books aren’t searcha­ble or easily rea­rran­gea­ble, and aren’t as ubi­qui­tous as the web.

I actually am wor­king on a new cate­gory in here that will pre­sent entries a little dif­fe­rently, to accom­mo­date the kind of note-taking that I’m tal­king about, but even that’s too manual. Why can’t I, for ins­tance, while lis­te­ning to a D+ album in foo­bar, click something that will allow me to leave a note on it? The note will be lin­ked to the album, to the song, to the artist, and to today’s date. Later that note will turn up in searches, and whe­ne­ver I focus on this song/album/artist again. There are a cou­ple solu­tions for this but all of them are inelegant.

It’s almost as though this whole para­digm of nodes needs to be re-thought. Nodes don’t ade­qua­tely mimic the way we think, our brains aren’t that com­part­men­ta­li­zed. When we are cons­ciously focu­sed on one thing, our atten­tion is also inad­ver­tently direc­ted towards rela­ted things. For ins­tance, when you think of an apple, you’re not likely thin­king only of the qua­li­ties of an apple; a small if unde­tec­ta­ble part of you is thin­king about Snow White, thin­king about Gene­sis, thin­king about pears. And when does something like an apple evolve from a con­fluence of impres­sions — their taste, their color, their shape — into something as “node”-like as “an apple”? Is an apple cate­go­ri­zed as “fruit” (which is itself a sub­ca­te­gory of “food”), and tag­ged as “crunchy,” “juicy,” “sweet,” etc.? Not exactly. And not to men­tion “an apple”’s faint asso­cia­tions with every expe­rience you’ve had with one. Should those expe­rien­ces be tag­ged “involved:apple”?

Simply put I guess it’s just a pro­blem of memory. When I lis­ten to an album for the first time, for ins­tance, I never want to for­get when I lis­te­ned to it and what I thought of it. Yet I think it hap­pens more often than not that when I lis­ten to something, I for­get soo­ner than later what I thought of it, or even that I lis­te­ned to it at all.

A real-world exam­ple: I down­loa­ded the new Evan­ge­li­cals record some months ago. I lis­te­ned to it once, and from what I can remem­ber, I liked it a fair amount. But I never touched it again. I for­got they existed.

When they ope­ned for Frog Eyes months later, I barely recog­ni­zed the name. I seriously belie­ved that I had only heard their name, but didn’t have a clue what they soun­ded like. It wasn’t until I was at the bar orde­ring a drink overhea­ring them play “Another Day” that it clic­ked. Since then I’ve lis­te­ned to the album half a dozen or more times and found that I really enjoy it.

So, that’s a pro­blem. What’s the solution?

I sup­pose I could have rated some of their songs when I first heard them. Loo­king at them now in my foo­bar, I see that “Another Day” is tag­ged with 4/5 stars. But when did I do that? I don’t know! I shouldn’t have to worry about these things.

What about a world in which, on some day a cou­ple weeks after I first heard that record, I ope­ned my media pla­yer and it pre­sen­ted me with that album, as if to ask me, “Hey, you lis­te­ned to this album for the first time a few weeks ago, right after you down­loa­ded it. You didn’t rate it; what did you think of it? Want to lis­ten to it now to remind your­self?” It’s not that far-fetched an idea. But, again: media pla­yers are lar­gely just spreadsheets.

What about all those movies I see thanks to Net­flix? What hap­pens to them years after I watch them? It’s as though I didn’t watch some of them at all. I remem­ber seeing Alpha­vi­lle some­time in 2005, for ins­tance, but other than some vague ima­gery I’ve retai­ned, I have no idea what that movie was like. Should I have writ­ten myself a short review of it after I watched it? Where would I have put it? What is the pro­per recep­tacle for that?

Somehow I’ve been trai­ned to think that I should be not only capa­ble of, but in fact acti­vely thin­king about everything I’ve expe­rien­ced all the time. That’s sick, isn’t it? Is that a pro­duct of the inter­net? Over-stimulation? Is per­fect recall too much to ask?