If I had started at 10 and expect to live to 80, recording the 2/3s I'm awake, I'd be looking at roughly 25 million minutes. Smart compression may give me decent quality at 1 Mb per minute -- so all I would need to record my entire life would be 25 million megabytes ~ a good 25 terabyte.
I already have a couple and they fit nicely on my desk. Would be easy to off-load as I went. Looking back the same amount of time my son would have to look forward to start the recording ... a similar storage capacity would be unthinkable. In reverse, when he reaches 10 it is quite thinkable that he could be carrying around the full load in something like a PDA. If image search evolves like Google did the Web, he may be able to describe a scene and jump right to it.
There are several of initiatives giving our daily lives the Tivo-like instant play-back option. Consider Deja View -- not fancy, but cheap and an interesting start.
The question in context of e-Presence is just how much presence we really want? Is the personal video memory potentially as annoying as the monkey-pushing use of e-mail? As noted repeatedly, e-mail is the perfect and counter-productive I-told-you-so tool. Recording everything may be next, effectively ruining spontaneity and turning even light exchanges in to solemn speeches depending on how one wants to be recalled rather than remembered.
Next time you see an oversized button, is your presence being recorded and will everything you say be used for or against you? I think I'm going to miss the nice neural filter, allowing me to keep the good parts and forgetting the bad...
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