“There was a king named Fornjot, he ruled over those lands which are called Finland and Kvenland; that is to the east of that bight of the sea which goes northward to meet Gandvik; that we call the Helsingbight.”

“I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn”.

It wasn’t particularly The Orkneyingers’ Saga that was on my mind as I fell asleep, nor was it Remembrance of Things Past. Yet both of them related back to a single theme. Instead, I was thinking about the book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell.

I had heard a discussion of the book on an NPR radio segment a couple weeks ago, and have been trying to get a chance to write about it ever since. It is a fascinating project to record ever increasing details of our personal lives. All kinds of concerns were raised about this. If we keep all our memories online, will we lose our ability to memorize things? There were discussions about how memorizing things actually makes one’s ability to memorize additional things easier. If everything is recorded for us, does our mind atrophy? What about the privacy issues, if every detail of our lives is recorded will we change the way we behave? Will people tap that information for marketing purposes or as part of criminal investigations? Will it move us closer to a world of thought crime?

How does blogging fit into this, and do we run the risk of becoming simply diarists spending too much time looking at what was as opposed to what could be?

It seems to me that the real issue isn’t how much of your life you’ve recorded, but what you can do with it. The simplest part is, can you easily find and retrieve the information that you’ve recorded?

In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust starts out, “For a long time I used to go to bed early”. There isn’t a specific date on this. He doesn’t start, “On July 17, 1876 I went to bed at 6:47 PM”. He continues with “I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn”. He does not state that they took a particular turn at 7:13 PM, although scholars might be very interested in when he really did go to bed and exactly how long it took for these thoughts to take a peculiar turn. Instead, it is all generalized, a collection of rather
imprecise memories.

The Orkneyingers’ Saga is even less precise. ““There was a king named Fornjot”. While we know that Proust was born on July 10, 1871, the day or year of Fornjot’s birth is not easy to find anywhere. Yet The Orkneyingers’ Saga was an important part of early collective memory.

All of this comes back to a few different themes for me. First, is how do we organize, search, retrieve, and make sense of information? I’ve not read Total Recall, but it seems as if this is the interesting part that is overlooked. How do we make random associations? I suspect that not many of my readers have associated The Orkneyingers’ Saga with Proust and Gordon Bell before.

Beyond that, when we make our random associations in our efforts to make sense of information, how do we tell the story? This is one of my gripes about all these “future of news” discussions. Whatever the media, video, print or online and whatever the label, be it journalist, blogger or some combination of the two, we need to make sense of information and tell it in a compelling story. The Orkneyingers’ Saga did that. Proust did that. Yet so much of the minutiae of modern news is just that, minutiae that has not been fit into a bigger picture, a more compelling story.

There are many more places I could go with this, but while Proust went to bed early, I’ve woken up early. It is still dark outside. The rain is falling and sleep beckons me back to another opportunity for my thoughts to take peculiar turns.