How Do We Make The Most Of Our Stories?

Whoa there! before we start talking about memories, lets be clear what we’re talking about. I want to suggest that human memories are not what we think they are.

Let me explain:
We can only remember an event once …
A long time ago, we were making a movie about a beautiful model who had had her arm destroyed by a supposedly tame tiger. Don’t ask…

We really needed a strong voice-over, in which the model described what happened in her own words. My problem was that whenever I asked her to talk about what happened, she sounded so cool that she leeched all the drama out of the scene.

Eventually I stopped and asked her how she could talk about the trauma so unemotionally. She said, “You’ve got to understand, I’ve had to go over it so many times, with the lawyers, the doctors and everyone …”

And then I realised that when she was talking to camera, she wasn’t remembering what had happened at all. She was remembering her last description. And that in turn was created by her memory of the previous description, and so on. And each description in this long chain was like a talk-therapy session, in which the pressure of the emotional sting dissolved into the fresh air.

We were stuck. So next day, I decided to ask her to remember something about the event that she had probably never recalled. If my theory was right, this would mean that her description would be closer to the event itself.

I asked her to start by describing the smells as she approached the cage. Then the sounds.

We got a very powerful, raw interview.

I’ve thought about this a lot since then. It taught me that, just as we can only ever see a film for the first time, once; only lose our virginity once (who was it who said, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin”?), so also we can only ever remember an event once. From then on, each time we remember it, the recollection will be filtered through all our previous recollections, like a mental version of Chinese whispers.

The memory is not the same as the event we remember
In his great book, “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”, Gregory Bateson cites Korzybski’s maxim that “The Map is not the Territory”, by which Korzybski meant that the symbol is not the same as the thing it symbolises – any more than the tag is the same as the thing we tag. Or as my wife says, any more than a wedding is a marriage.

Well, in the same way, I’d like to suggest Alan’s maxim: “A memory is not the same as what is being remembered.”

But much more than is the case with maps and territories, our memories present themselves as if they really were the same as the original. In fact, the only difference we usually allow, is that the memory may be less distinct.

And so we swear in court or in the pub that we are remembering the whole truth. And we believe it. And we can’t understand how it happens that one sister remembers mother in a green dress and the other sister “knows” it was a red dress. Of course both sisters are accurately reporting their memories. It’s just that over time, the memory and the event diverge imperceptibly.

Next entry, I’ll try to explore this as an aspect of consciousness: when some time soon we accuse a machine of being affected by false memory syndrome, we’ll know we are dealing with a conscious machine.

Rememble and memory
What’s the relevance of this to Rememble? Rememble can make us aware of this process. And more, as it develops it might allow us to roll back to any of the previous memory states we had.

[Posted by Alan Sekers]

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So I’m noticing a conflict, a tension, a build-up of frustration even. I’m not just noticing it inside myself, but also from the many other workshop participants I’ve been working with over at the Digital Health Workshops. It’s this:

Life-streaming services feel like they’re important, but for all the time they ask of me, what do they give back to me that actually matters?

Obviously, I love life-streaming. I love knowing that I’m collecting my fragments - videos, images, texts, tweets etc for prosperity. Services like: Twitter, Evernote, Miomi, Flickr (Mr Bowbrick’s favourite), Rememble and many more, are great and evolving and intertwining every day.

Here’s the thing: most of us are time poor
In the main, we’re working harder than ever and have more things than ever competing for our time and attention (which of course reduces the quality of the attention we give things but that’s another blog post…). So even if we do use any of these services on a regular basis - how will we ever get time to re-enjoy any of it?

So what’s the point? What are we really learning from digitally remembering things?
For me it’s:

• A sense of self / awareness
• A sense of what is important to me
• A sense of my character (good/surprising or not)
• And a weird feeling that my extended digital brain is somehow in order and healthy. Strange but comforting.

That’s all very nice, but where is life-streaming going?
It’s sucking time from our real life, so what does it deliver in return? For me it has to be tangible, physical. It has to make something new and of real benefit happen in our actual real lives. A mix of Rememble and School Of Everything anyone?

[Posted by Gavin O’Carroll]

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I’ve always been a big fan of the Long Now project and all that stuff about really long-range thinking and using technology to defy the fugitive nature of memory and human culture and so on (although I can’t help but harbour a tiny fear that there’s a secret fascistic earth cult hiding in there somewhere and that one day all those benign-looking hippy-billionaires will turn super-advanced weapons on the rest of us and make us wear spandex uniforms and eat Alfalfa or something).

So anyway, Evernote, which has been a fairly handy universal note-taking doodad for Windows for years, is evolving into something much grander: a sort of personal companion to the Long Now libraries and clocks and priesthoods. It’s a cloud of clever apps and services that you can use to remember everything forever. And they’re serious about the everything part and the forever part. Of course, it turns out the organisations overlap: Evernote founders are Long Now charter members and so on, so they have priorities in common (and now my conspiracy cult thing looks a bit less crazy, right?).

Jon Udell has interviewed Endnote CEO and all-round interesting bloke Phil Libin about what he calls ‘personal outboard memory’. You can listen the interview here or as part of the IT Conversations podcast here.

By the way, this has been my first contribution to the Rememble blog since I joined Gavin as an advisor to help him and his team turn Rememble into something huge and… er… memorable.

[Posted by Steve Bowbrick]

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The lovely people at ECCA came and filmed us back in October and have just this week released the video case-study of Rememble. ECCA helped us in the pre-dawn of Rememble while I leaned the ropes and were there filming at our launch at Future of Web Apps. Check it out below or on their website. A big thanks to all involved.

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Just to say a big thanks to Jeff Barr for his original blog post on our launch. Similarly, another big thanks to Damien Mulley for his post, and to Mike Butcher for his Techcrunch UK/Ireland article, where it was very flattering indeed to be compared to Miomi.

And lots more thanks to all who have been blogging and link posting. It’s been great to see news spread :)

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Happy New Year out there! Hope it was a great one for one and all. The Rememble team is back, full of energy and Remembling love.

First off for 2008 is a nice new top navigation which should make Rememble a lot easier to navigate. Enjoy, let us know if you like it and do stay tuned for more new stuff.

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Check out the Rememble interview with Intruders.tv at FOWAs. Thanks guys!

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It’s been a hectic month here at Rememble towers since we launched at the FOWAs early in October. I’ve had a lot of great feedback and lots of people getting in touch with lots of new opportunities (after our first live weekend I logged on to 400+ emails… mental…) which is super-cool. All of this to give some reasoning to why we’ve been quiet on the old blog for a few weeks.

Right, onward with the next bit. News is that we’re having a party for all the people who’ve helped us get this far tomorrow night ( Friday the 9th November). If you know us, have met us or have just been using the site as it’s taken it’s baby steps please drop by an have a drink with us, 7:00pm - 11:00pm at: Bar Kick, 126-127 Shoreditch High Street, London, United Kingdom. View Map There’ll be lots of pats on backs and table football. How could you miss it? :) That’s it for now. Stay tuned.

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Yes indeed. We’ve finally launched! It’s been an amazing week for us at Future Of Web Apps. We met lots of great people with amazing projects and businesses, learned a lot, had a tipple or two and got some really great feedback on Rememble.

Thanks to all who have been beta testing with us over the last few months, thank to all who have blogged about us so far and thanks to everyone who came to our stand this week and showed an interest in our approach. We’ve been overwhelmed by your kind comments and words of encouragement.

So, there we have it - Rememble is open for all to join, so if you’ve signed up and you like what you see please tell your friends, family, colleagues and muses. Let’s get the world Remembling!

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I just newslettered ‘How to upload SMS/text messages to Rememble’ and the memble count sped right up past 1000 and counting! This calls for a celebratory sticker or ten.

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