Late last year, Oregon Scientific came out with a new, lightweight “stunt cam” designed to be mounted on helmets, bikes, dive masks, reading glasses, etc. It records up to two hours of 640×480, 30 fps video and is designed for thrill-seekers who want to preserve their dangerous, adrenaline-soaked activities for YouTube or America’s Least Advisable Home Videos or whatever.
So What?
I noticed a while ago that people have begun wearing wireless headsets even when they’re not on the phone, just because the ear is the most convenient place to store them. (I’m convinced the technology is being adopted by people who (for whatever reason) talk to themselves–just pop a headset into your ear and you can rave at invisible beings all you want–no one will give you a second glance.) Add a miniature camera to a headset and it becomes a personal “black box” precisely analogous to the black boxes in aircraft.
A permanent camera would bring you increased physical safety and reduced risk of sexual (and other) harassment (no more -ist jokes in your presence, that’s for sure). The technology would also bring huge memory benefits by recording most of your personal and professional interactions.
Of course, recording isn’t really the problem–storage and bandwidth are rapidly getting to the point where it’s feasible to record a life. The problem is retrieval–finding the right clip in what could be thousands of hours of video. Low-cost, off-shore labor might help: Discreet analysts would transcribe your feed so that it could be indexed and later searched using–let’s call it Google Life.
You won’t want to remember everything, of course. Someone once offered to teach Themistocles (ancient Greek statesperson) the art of memory. “Teach me rather the art of forgetting,” Themistocles replied. He had a point. You’ll want a procedure for expunging the bad stuff from the record. Such as when your high-adrenaline “Wax the Weasel” stunt goes horribly, horribly wrong.
