Thinkcorps

I stayed up late last night, reading Blankets, by Craig Thompson, a graphic novel I’d been meaning to pick up for quite a while. It’s a very personal story about his Christian upbringing and brief first love. It’s a really beautiful story and well told. It reminded me in so many ways of myself and the emotions I struggled with as a teen (probably everyone struggled with). It wasn’t any specific details, though I grew up in Wisconsin, did some church youth group, too. It was simply an intense emotional resonance, basically one of the reasons the world needs writers: they remember the things we don’t. After reading the book, wisps of those recalled emotions clung to me until I finally fell asleep.

This morning I woke up and stepped back into my work routine in front of the computer. Alex demonstrated for me the new address autocomplete feature he just added to his Webmail product, ATPmail. He’s also going to add a filtering mechanism, so that the addresses come up in order of most recently used. With every feature added, ATPmail becomes more of a suite of database tools—your mail, addressbook, etc, is the data.

Which brings me to Gmail. Why a free Web-based email program has become so popular, so desperately wanted, is beyond me, but it’s obviously got a lot to do with the abstract allure of “search”. Alex and I tinker and discuss ATPmail, his Web-based email system, every day, and Gmail is a welcome step forward and innovative competitor (note: we’re tiny, Gmail is, naturally, big). But email is not unstructured text, like a Web page. Email has lots of headers, a subject, a body, and most important, a date. The reality is, there’s a lot of value in “filtering” email, but not so much in full text search on a 1GB archive of old mail.

As email ages, it loses most of its efficacy. Like most things, its context and relevancy fades. Gmail retains the conversation thread, which I suppose allows you to rebuild as much of the context as possible, but that assumes a long and detailed conversation, an epistolary form which I’d argue has been dealt a somewhat permanent blow by email itself. We note things in email, we shout out, we remind, we ask—we don’t often discuss at length. Email is sparse and direct, which further erodes its context over time—there’s just not that much to contextualize in a typical message thread.

But each of us has already invested so much of our lives in email. Most of us have mail archives, from work or a previous email program, deep in a folder somewhere on our computers. We’ll probably never retrieve that old mail—those experiences—whether because of neglect or simple technological incompatibility. That record of our lives is lost. And that’s frightening. So many days and interactions, so many events and stories, all lost in the ether or locked in a bit.

Maybe that’s the great promise of Gmail (and desktop search as well). An accessible archive of experience, transcoded into hard drives across the Internet. We might forget, but Google won’t. I don’t think it matters so much that the context will be indecipherable, that we won’t remember who that person was, or why that line was supposed to be funny. It will all be in there, ready for reminiscence if we ever want it.

I think that’s comforting when your life is lived on a digital plane. Google sees your tracks in the sand, even if few oth-ers do.
—end ramble