Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 34, No. 215.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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        Date: 2020-08-07 06:32:44+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty 
        Subject: about you and where you have been

 From Khalid Warsame, "This Vast Conspiracy of Memory", Meanjin
(https://meanjin.com.au/essays/this-vast-conspiracy-of-memory/):

> Google has this handy and terrifying feature called Timeline, which
> shows you everywhere you’ve ever been, how many times you’ve been
> there, and how long you’ve been there each time. It collects data
> from your phone, constantly if you have an Android, and if you have
> an iPhone, it logs your location every time you open the Google Maps
> app. Nothing disappears: your every movement is a collection of data
> points, fed into algorithms that use this information to do
> everything from alert you to traffic jams in your area to notify you
> when you’re running low on nappies for your newborn.
...
> But here is what I know: there are some things that I remember and
> some things that I do not, and time as I experience it is not the
> same as time as it happened: I’ve shed far too many cells and
> memories and gained nothing in return for it except for some fading
> memories. Perhaps that’s what is so obscene to me about the idea of
> an app or website telling me things about myself that I know to be
> true.

Yours,
WM

--
Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/),
Professor emeritus, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College
London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
(www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20) and Humanist (www.dhhumanist.org)




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