The Eidetic Narcissist — How to Digitize Yourself As If Anyone Cared

Gordon Bell is the guy featured on this HOME PAGE and he's engaged in a slightly weird project, but fascinating as well. It's called the MyLifeBits Project and it seeks to capture everything you see and do and store it on digital media. SEE HERE That seems like the ultimate project for a Narcissist but I suppose it has practical uses as well. I just picked up a tiny 4Gig Flash Drive that was very tiny, about the size of a postage stamp the other day at Staples and it's fascinating to contemplate the potential of all this compact memory to store images, videos, sound recordings, pdf files and the like on everything you do. My students, the millenial generation, are so steeped in technology that they look like Martians crossing the campus with their cell phone antennas sticking out of their ears. They take literally hundreds and in some cases thousands of digital photographs and post them to their FaceBook accounts for all the world to see. Being linked-in, connected is a new form of belonging that those of us older folks can hardly imagine as a real need, but the students say it is very important to them. They text each other throughout the day and often have their cellphones up to their ears on the way out of class. I don't know what any of it means, but it seems like a very narcissistic impulse to be so needful of attention. We all seek to be loved and to love but an old fogie like me can't see this as anything but over the top. For more about Gordon Bell check out the EXTENDED BIO