Jason’s going to make a movie, or at least I hope he is. He told me a little bit about his idea over dinner last weekend.
Imagine a world in the not-distant future where your whole attention stream is recorded, your whole life is recorded, maybe even your innermost thoughts. Now imagine that you can share the totality of this information with someone else. Just press the button. Would you share this data with anyone? What about someone you love? Could any relationship stand this much honesty?
This was a profound twist on the way we (I!) normaly think about issues of recording, attention, and privacy. We’ve been focussed on keeping this data under our control, worrying about it being stolen and/or misused by [take your pick] advertisors, governments, big brothers. But would we (should we) willingly share this data with those that we trust? We’re getting the first tastes of this issue now. But with great data comes great responsibility!
Hurry up on that film, Jason. I want to see how it ends!
ps- I searched in vain this morning for a blog post I read this summer which showed that within 20 years you’ll be able to record an entire lifetime in HD video for $100 worth of hard disk. Does anyone else remember this one? (Search engines have a long way to go!)