Everything is Recorded

Sometimes it is great to be able to record things such as the instant replay in sports or for surveillance purposes. Other times, being able to record everything seems to take away from the moments. We worry about losing our privacy but there are a lot more aspects of life that we will lose if everything is recorded. Thanks to our near-endless access to digital recording devices, the less-than-Hollywood version of you will be immortalized on the home computer, or stored for generations in some digital computing cloud. Wearable devices like Google Glass with its internet phone services are only a hint of what is to come — ever smaller and cheaper, and tied to inexpensive digital storage. Records of voices and events will be a permanent part of the Internet the way text is already, held forever and searched, mined and inspected. Casual conversations and off-the-cuff quips are about be put through the data blender, scrutinized and organized and pumped through algorithms in search of deeper meaning. Is this the direction that we want to be going in as a society?