Phil Wallach

You know how you look through the family album and find all those old weird photos of great-grandpa and great-aunt Beatrice?  I don’t know about you, but when I look at those old, old photos I always wonder what those people were really like.  In that sense, while I find them interesting, they are also somehow unsatisfying, because in the end I don’t really know who they were.  Its just a picture.

In this modern age we find ourselves in we have social networking sites to find and interact with other people, blogging as a way of expressing ourselves, and all manner of forums and mailing lists to explore ideas and opinions, even while we move towards an age of seemingly infinite storage. I was wondering what the impact would be if we came to the position that the increase in storage more than absorbed the creative output of the planet, so we never had to remove a thing from the Internet ever again.  Everything that was created would remain there for all time.

What that means is that we have the potential to pull all these sources of information about a person together, and form the mental equivalent of a photograph. That is, a view of who someone is/was in terms of who they interacted with and the content they created on the Internet. Instead of being a photograph, which is a visual representation, I would call this a memegraph, which is a representation of an individual’s thoughts, ideas and personality.  (As an aside, what I really want to call this is a me-me-graph, but I don’t think that is going to take off).

So what would this mean?  That means that in the future I could look up past or present people (such as people in my family tree) and see who they really were. I could aggregate all the things that are being aggregated now into one complex picture.  Even better I could see how things changed over time; because nothing has been deleted I could access a history of that person’s mental landscape.

So I could see how grandpa’s ideas on the stock market crash of 2012 evolved, and when he first predicted it.

Note:  I Googled “memegraph” and unsurprisingly the term has already been used.  But I still think it is an interesting idea …