brown2020

Every song ever written started with a first experimental musical note of the composer. In the same way, every essay, every letter, every book, every blog post, started with that first mental note of the author. Most of the time, our ideas and experiences float away and we forget them. Sometimes, we jot a thought down, remember it, and it leads to new experiences. Sometimes an idea, an experience, a name and phone number, or a note-to-self remembered rather than forgotten, makes the difference in the direction of our lives.

Taking notes can translate a fleeting conception in our brain into action, and that action usually involves sharing our experience or idea with someone else. As we carry more and more powerful technology around with us every moment of the day, might it be possible that we can start to translate more of our otherwise forgotten notes-to-self and fleeting experiences into shared experiences? Into the start of conversations that make our lives richer?

In 1995, Bill Gates concluded his book The Road Ahead with a prescient but disquieting idea: Carrying around mobile technology connected to networks would lead to the fully “documented life”:

“Your wallet PC will be able to keep audio, time, location, and eventually even video records of everything that happens to you. It will be able to record every word you say and every word said to you, as well as your body temperature, your blood pressure, the barometric pressure, and a variety of other data about you and your surroundings.… It will be able to track your interactions with the network—all of the commands you issue, the messages you send, the people you call or who call you.”

What made the “documented life” such a scary idea was the notion that we were not the ones doing the documenting. Someone else, enabled by pervasive computing technology, was documenting us, and using our data for some other purpose—perhaps understanding insurance risk, perhaps figuring out how to best persuade us to buy something, perhaps something more nefarious. The passive voice of the “documented life” left open the question: Documented by whom? The function of technology might be one of monitoring us rather than empowering us.

Sometimes monitoring can be a good thing—health monitoring, for example. If we have a chronic health condition like diabetes or heart disease, then we might want the reassurance that someone is monitoring us in order to identify problems early, before something gets worse. Health, after all, is rife with cognitive dissonance: We often do not do or pay attention to the things that we know consciously are healthy or are the right things to do. Remote health monitoring can help us share that responsibility with someone else, someone who can coach us and support us.

Remote health monitoring is, even if good for you, usually implemented by someone else with their own interests in mind. A telehealth monitoring device can query me at my bedside:

How are you feeling today, [insert patient name]?
Did you take your [insert prescription name] medications?
Do you have any new symptoms of your [diabetes, heart disease, asthma, COPD]?
What is your [blood glucose, blood pressure, weight, peak respiratory flow, temperature, blood oxygen saturation, pulse]?

Of course, remote monitoring systems can be more thoughtful and personalized than the example above, but the fact that remote patient monitoring encounters are pre-scripted makes them inherently impersonal, no matter how good the algorithms are at inserting my name and my needs in the right place at the right time. And the stated purpose is the automation and increased productivity of someone who otherwise might have to pay for my hospital bill.

Social media, on the other hand, is all about me sharing my experience, through my networks, with others that I choose, or with the world at large, if I so choose.

Wikipedia, the global experiment in sharing knowledge that has replaced every other encyclopedia, currently defines social media as follows:

Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences.

This is the current definition of social media, but it could change. In fact, if you are so inclined, you can register at Wikipedia right now and try your hand at improving on this or any other article. But you better be a great writer and know your references, or the TheRedPenOfDoom will undo your work. Wikipedia has become so robust and accurate because the collective intelligence of an extensive community, constantly checking and curating the content, is far greater than any individual writer or editor. In Wikipedia, together we are documenting the life of the human race.

Social media enables a documented life, but unlike The Road Ahead, the subject is clear: We are the primary actors doing the documenting. We can share our photos on Flickr, our videos on YouTube, our friends on Facebook, our musical tastes on MySpace, what we are doing right now on Twitter or FriendFeed, news and websites that interest us on Digg or StumbledUpon or Delicious, our resume on LinkedIn, our contact information on Plaxo, our ideas on WordPress or Blogger, and much more.

Despite the plethora of opportunities to share using social media, we remain challenged by the fact each service only feels appropriate for a subset of our ideas, for a subset of people with whom we might want to share. With all the fragmentation, sharing becomes work. But in the end, each service aims to do the same fundamental thing: Help us record and share our ideas. And each service is based on the same fundamental premise: That our lives are richer when we share.

When we participate in social media today, we need have a good sense of what we want to share, with whom, and with which type of media, before we even login. It doesn’t matter that every idea I might want to share starts with a private mental note to myself, that every idea that starts with a mental note might evolve to include many media types and might be something to share with many different audiences. I need to be comfortable enough with what I want to say, to whom, and how I want to express it to thrust myself into a particular public space when I login.

What I am looking for is a better way to capture and share my thoughts and experiences—first as mental notes to myself, and then later, after I refine and edit them, after I decide with whom and when and where, to share them. I am looking for something that requires no effort, no work, yet can help me record rich and detailed information. Something that can capture my shorthand chicken scratches, but knows what I mean enough to fill in the blanks and complete the sentences. I am looking for something unscripted, yet intelligent, so that the right services can do something useful with the information I collect in ways that help me.

Every WordPress blog, every Facebook update, every Digg news post, started with an experience or an idea that, for whatever reason, someone thought might be worth remembering. When we want to remember something, it is because we want to act on it; if not now, then someday. Time slips away, but some of the stream of ideas and experiences beg to be captured so that they can be shared. Each note that we want to remember has a purpose; it is an idea that seeks to achieve some result. That result is most often achieved by sharing.

Note taking is a social act. A fully documented life enabled by technology might scare us, but a life that we document more fully, so that we can share more fully, is one that just might be richer.