#7 Technology - lifelogging, mobile phones etc.

We went to the Melbourne Show the other night and after a fair bit of inner turmoil I decided to go on the giant Ferris Wheel (the one that is fearsomely high with fully-enclosed glass-sided gondalas that sway gently in the breeze). This was the first Ferris Wheel ride I'd had since I was about four I reckon. You see I suffer from claustrophobia and a fear of heights so this was a biggy for me. The first few minutes were the worst: I now know that the cliche "to have one's heart in one's mouth" is not a cliche at all but an accurate description of what happens when you are wrestling with a full-on panic attack. My heart must have been in my mouth because I could hear it pounding in my ears and at a rate way faster than is healthy and something was stopping me from breathing properly and no matter how much I swallowed I couldn't dislodge it.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family were finding the view AWESOME and the lights AMAZING. My daughter grabbed the mobile phone and started taking pictures of the city lights and the pullsating neon rainbow of the other rides and sideshows below. Then she shot some video footage - on the phone - panning around the gondola and momentarily catching me on camera. I'm sure I had the look on my face of some small creature about to become road-kill. I remember thinking "if I have a heart attack now, she's going to get it on film: DON'T HAVE A HEART ATTACK!!!"
Anyway, I survived the first few minutes and with lots of encouraging self-talk and white-knuckled gripping of the seat I even managed to look around a bit (around, not down) and affirm that yes, the view was AWESOME and the lights AMAZING.
It was wonderful to reach the ground again and I was really quite proud of myself. I looked at the photos on the phone and although they are interesting and (some) quite beautiful, I really don't need them: I'll save the experience to my mind's hard drive and retrieve it next time I have to negotiate a plane trip or a lift to the 30th floor of a building. I would post a shot of me looking feral on the Ferris Wheel for the world's enjoyment but we don't appear to have the technology or the knowhow to get the photos OFF the phone!
Which segues nicely to...an article I was reading on "lifelogging", which is recording and storing, as much as possible, all the information of your life: "everything you did for every minute of every day". It just seems crazy, self-indulgent and insufferably boring to me. But I do love the delicious irony that "lifeblogs begun at any given time may not be readable in the future if programs and formats continue to be superseded. Imagine having your entire life only on tape, and no VCR to play it back on" (The Age Good Weekend 6/10/2007)
It seems to me that just being able to do something is not justification enough for doing it. Having said that, the possibilities that mobile phone and information sharing technology offer to us now are truly amazing and have great potential for doing good in the world.
Which brings me to a thought-provoking article I found called "How Mobiles and Blogs Don't -- and Do -- Help Human Rights" on a great site http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007350.html.
It talks about the images coming out of Burma right now that let people around the world see what is happening to the anti-government protesters. It seems vital that these things are recorded and disseminated but the question is posed as to whether it makes any difference to what is happening: the government is still engaged in brutal repression regardless of whether cameras are rolling or not.
It makes me think back to Tiannamen Square and the days before mobile phone technology could be used by ordinary people to bear witness to human rights abuses. I still hold in my mind's eye the image of the man who stood in front of the tanks - one image that went all around the world before an awful visual silence descended and who outside China really knows the full extent of what followed?
I missed "International Bloggers' Day for Burma" on the 4th of October when bloggers were asked to hold off blogging and instead put up one banner underlined with the words „Free Burma!“. How effective was it? I don't know. How can you measure such a thing? I think you do what you can in hope.