"Remember This" Response

Alec Wilkinson's essay on Gordon Bell was actually an enjoyable read even though a staple was present. Gordon's goal of "going paperless" was quite entertaining and almost easy for me to relate to. Although he was quite extreme, preserving and storing appliance manuals and phone calls, I have taken to hoarding of all sorts of similar items. While I simply keep wine corks and massive amounts of pictures from several generations of my family, I have photographed and scanned baseball, plane, and movie stubs, greeting cards, postcards, and business cards. Everyday items that may or may not hold some value to me are kept in two acid-free boxes under my bed. Throughout the reading on Bell, I found myself wanting to diagnose him with some sort of disorder. His behavior seems obsessive and slightly crazy, but then I began to realize that maybe so is keeping metered stamps and old to do lists.

In the end, I concluded that Bell's archive system is disconcerting. I think that hoarding evidence from every year, day, or minute of your life is a tough job and probably not space efficient at all, but the thought of having a machine act as a flawless memory is just too much for me to think about, which is unfortunate because based on this article, it seems slightly realistic. Whether we can admit it or not, we each have a selective memory. Like Wilkinson discusses, when we create a mental memory about a person we walk away with and without specific details. The emphasis on what we might remember is what makes it so unique. For me it would be things like remembering the way my grandparents house smells and maybe not the floor layout or associating a song with my freshman year roommates but maybe not remembering what they wore the first day I met them. Preserving information is something that I believe should be left to the mind of an individual, which could possibly be supplemented by the ticket stub to game four of the 2004 World Series or a stamp on a postcard sent from Argentina. In addition to collecting tangible evidence of certain experiences, we have cameras, which seems like enough of a tool to preserve memories. If we were supposed to remember everything that we wore, ate, said, and did, we would have evolved to do so.