dessalles

Just starting to dig a deeper into the cultural impact of exhaustive recording - part emerging technology, part byproduct of ubiquitous computing. The question is simple: What changes when everything is recorded? What new consumption and production practices emerge in such a future? I don’t mean to imply there will ever be a time when everything is recorded, but the trends I’m seeing are definitely, um, trending in that direction…

Last Sunday’s New York Times ran a story on a company called Replay Solutions. They record computing:

For software developers, the flaws that cause crashes rank among their biggest problems, especially the ones that can’t be reproduced, like the proverbial noise in the car engine that disappears when you visit the mechanic.

Mr. Lindo says he and Mr. Daudel found themselves overwhelmed by bugs they couldn’t find while working together at an Internet start-up in 2002. “We were spending almost all of our time not fixing the issues, but trying to get to the point where we could just see the issue, and we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just TiVo this and replay it?”’ Mr. Lindo recalls.

So that’s essentially what they built. In their own words, Replay Director:

[…] identifies every potential source of non-determinism in your application, and records it. During playback, the recorded data is fed back to your application and asynchronous timings are reproduced. The result is a perfect, line-for-line playback execution of the software you have recorded.

Rather than solve the problem by introducing more intelligence at the point of failure, their approach is to just record as much of the failure as possible and worry about what caused it later. What’s interesting with Replay Director is the new form of specialization it introduces. What was once a single activity of producing and documenting software glitches becomes two: producing them now and analyzing them later. When everything is recorded, new forms of specialization emerge(?).

Understanding new technologies by way of analogy has been common practice since well before carriages shed their horses. And TiVo seems on it’s way to becoming the de facto analogy for new recording technologies. WebMynd, a Firefox plug-in that “records” your web browsing by saving a copy (code, text & images) of every single page you view, bills itself as a “TiVo for the Web”. A couple interesting things about actually saving the pages you visit: First, if a website is taken down, you still have your own copy. And second, WebMynd naturally compiles snapshots of all the dynamic pages you regularly visit. Wondering what a friend’s Facebook profile looked like 6 months ago? Check your archives. But more importantly, you no longer have to worry about what you what may or may not be relevant to you in the future. When everything is recorded, the interaction costs of anticipation are replaced by material costs of storage and search(?).