[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?