How did ‘through’ get that silly ‘ough’?  Is this what happens when you let thousands of years of design by committee create your language?  I think it’s high time we clean up our spelling and get logical.  ‘Thru’ works great for me!

But would ‘spelling reform’ (as Wikipedia calls it) be worth it at this point, or are we already moving beyond the written word?  Today, the hot new trend is video.  But as one coWORKer put it “the problem with video is you gotta watch it.” In the future we might find ourselves signing off on video contracts and using Google Glass to capture our entire lives so no moment is lost.  The issue we ran into with both of these scenarios is that video is cumbersome to search.  Scanning a word document for a specific clause is currently a lot easier than fast forwarding through a film.

Last week we talked about owning information.  This week we wanted to know how best to record information.  The amount of data we can record and save is awesome, but also completely overwhelming.  I have a thousand photos on my phone from this year alone!  Facial recognition software can help find the pictures of my daughter, sound bite searches can help identify a song, but often what we need to find is subtle.  Our current technology is too clunky to detect that moment you left your keys under a stack of papers on the kitchen counter or that time your husband agreed to take out the trash for eternity.  Have you ever saved a file to your computer thinking you were good to go only to come back a few months later and have no idea which folder to look in?  That happened to me today!

And now that we have tons of information (assuming we can find it) how to we curate it?  Editing becomes key.  I can’t possibly use 1,000 photos a year so choosing what to keep and what to delete is the task at hand.  And how we edit all of this can define our lives.  Facebook offered up video montages of your life (based on their own selections from what you’ve presented on their social network), the movie ‘Final Cut’ explored what happens when you compile secret video of your friends’ most despicable moments, and coWORKer Armand wonders “If I died tomorrow what would people make of my life based on what they find on my phone?”

So is this wealth of data a blessing or a curse?  Hopefully future technology will aid our brains in the search for specifics but for now I can spend my time organizing my past into searchable files so that tomorrow I might be able to find what happened last year…or I can sit back and enjoy today.