Finally, a gadget that allows you to rewind life. A tiny video camera (the manufacturers expect you to clip it to your glasses – but if you got used to that Bluetooth headset this should be easy enough) that records continuously and retains a 30-second buffer. Pressing record writes the last 30 seconds to disk – in principle, you need never miss anything again. In practice, of course, you’ll find yourself needing a larger and larger buffer. I think I’d need about thirty-five years…
The wholesale Tivo-isation of life is under way. There’ll soon be no need to actually experience anything – you can just wait til you get home and replay the whole thing on the big screen in your living room. Once we’re all time-shifting life, the disconcerting feeling that your companion is experiencing things a couple of minutes behind you (because they put life on pause while they went for a smoke) will become commonplace…
Those are some trippy thoughts.
Cool gadget, be better in a couple of years time when they can make it smaller and capable of recording more etc.
You’d look more than a little silly with that thing on your head. TiVo’s jump-back-15-seconds button is one of the most useful features. But in real life, you can’t catch up during the adverts… or can you?
I suppose the story goes like this: life as experienced is full of redundancies. The average human being has sensory bandwidth and cognitive capacity to spare and could handle two simultaneous streams of experience – one actual and one time-shifted – easily (I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s quite possible to watch two movies at the same time without missing anything significant in either). Perhaps the latter might actually reinforce the former and make your minute-to-minute interactions more vivid – “hold on, I’ll just play that back…” Of course, this is all bullshit. I can’t think of anything worse than time-shifting experience… Our attention is diluted enough as it is. We need technologies to increase our connection with the *here and now*, not to further distance us from it… Also, you *would* look pretty silly :->