Too Much Information and a Life Reconstructed

(Before It's News)

Today I have done what I have done many times; I think I started doing it more than forty years ago and today I did it using the devices of this age, rather than the pencil or ball point pen and paper that I did use before. I take, not an exercise book but a computer, which I open. I take a facsimile of a page from the word processing programme. I push and prod my fingers over the keyboard and start writing, wondering where the writing will take me.

Somewhere, every stroke of the keyboard is being recorded; every word I have deleted and have over written could, if though necessary be reconstructed in ways that I can hardly imagine. To reconstruct someone’s writing is a shameful thing; it is like reconstructing a courtship. The mistakes and mis-matches of the moment should be hidden from sight in perpetuity. The final piece should speak for itself.

And that has set me to thinking about just how much about us future generations may find out about us if they wished, and of course for important people they will so wish. Every journey on public transport may be recorded somewhere in electronic tickets that operate for our convenience on subways, trams, planes trains and even car journeys where we pass tolls, traffic cameras and stop at filling stations. Our medical records will be useful in reconstructing a life – what doctors we visited and why, our complaints of pains and ailments and our physical imperfections.

Our relationships will be no matter of mere speculation and deduction – there will be hard evidence on a hard drive somewhere, which will be romanticised in a particular emotionless way.

“Too much information” is not just a jest to be repeated when we let slip something personal and mildly embarrassing, but a truth of living in this age where so much is recorded. We can, but the recording of these trivia, perhaps provide future historians with an understanding of our times, but we are more likely to provide them with an ability to reconstruct not our lives but the events of our lives, keeping the mystery of life as intractable as ever.

Filed under: climate change Tagged: life, mystery of life, philosophy, writing

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