David Pogue is full of Krapp

Image by randal-schwartz via Flickr

In  Krapp’s Last Tape Samuel Beckett dramatizes a man minutes away from turning 69 talking with his younger selves through one of the audiotapes he records every year on his birthday, this one from 30 years ago. Set in “A late evening in the future” the back-and-forth between the older self and the recorded younger ones is a profound meditation on desire and self-deception, as well as on how memory both protects against and causes the unbearable losses life has us bear.

In a real-life version of Krapp’s experience of using recording technology to talk to earlier selves, David Pogue wrote a “From the Desk of…” piece yesterday about saving 15 years of family videotape from “data rot … the distressing tendency of our recordings and computer files to become inaccessible as it’s orphaned by new technology.”

After going to the Consumer Electronics Show last month and seeing only one videotape recorder displayed, he realized his massive cache of family movies lovingly recorded over 15 years would soon be unwatchable because no device would be available on which to watch. So, being the take-charge guy I’ve always found both affable and helpful, he took charge. With terabytes of hard-drive storage in hand he transferred all his videos there from tape. Along the way, his wife and kids would come to his office and watch whatever tape was in the process of being transferred.

Sounding very much like the younger Krapp describing moments of love, hope, and happiness the older character on stage can only feel by their absence, Pogue writes,

And what I discovered has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with emotion, family and memory.

I’m telling you, these tapes are INCREDIBLE. My wife and children wander up to my attic office, spot whatever movie is currently importing, and they’re just goggle-eyed. We’d completely forgotten what we used to look like, how we used to talk. Our lives are so full, we barely recognize some of the places we’ve been and the experiences we’ve had.

My children shriek with glee at the old haircuts, the cute things they said when they were toddlers, the funny dances they used to do around the house. “Oh, I remember that!” my wife and I keep shouting. My youngest, who’s five, has had his mind blown by images of the family before he came along.

via From the Desk of David Pogue – Why We Make Home Videos – NYTimes.com.

Nicely described, I told you he was affable. Later he says,

Watching your past life is entertaining, yes, but it also makes you think, take stock, reach new conclusions about yourself and the way you live life, about the dynamic of your family and how it changes as each new child comes along.

via From the Desk of David Pogue – Why We Make Home Videos – NYTimes.com.

And then,

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” wrote Thoreau. And what I’ve learned from my video-transfer project is this: You can’t examine your life if you can’t remember it.

via From the Desk of David Pogue – Why We Make Home Videos – NYTimes.com.

But you don’t need a recording to remember. In fact, memory and recordings are fundamentally different. All memory is a complex act of meaning-making that takes into account what the current situation affords along with what has already been remembered and one’s desires for what comes next. We create memories from this moment-by-moment dynamic of past, present, and future. Memory is not at all like reading data from a videotape or hard drive, and equating remembering with watching a recording is a mistake.

What videos provide our remembering minds are retrieval cues, powerful retrieval cues that can bring back many lost details. But video can also short-circuit the operation of other quieter more subtle retrieval cues that just may be as meaningful as those provided by full-color stereophonic and eventually 3-D video.

For example, shared memories help hold families together because we hold different memories for each other, I remember this piece and you that piece. That’s what makes reminiscing such a powerfully intimate and creative experience. But when you have a video you don’t need each other. That remembering together strengthens intimate bonds raises lots of questions: Will the bonds in a family weaken when one’s autobiography gets built from increasingly available and powerfully salient technologically-mediated recordings rather than intimate reminiscence? Will we have access to more accurate personal “data” but less connection to each other? Will David Pogue’s children become old like Beckett’s Krapp wandering alone on stage bathing themselves in “data” from their personal past? I hope not, but, truth be told, I really don’t know.

How video-documented lives will play out 30 years from now when Pogue ages like Beckett’s Krapp is anybody’s guess. What we do know is having access to those recordings, and his children growing up in such well-recorded lives, is profoundly different than anything people have experienced up until now. Ignoring this difference is even more dangerous than leaving banana peels strewn about one’s study (if you’ve seen the play you know what I mean).