One of my twin boys is barking in his sleep. It is 5am. Sleep fast turns to waking, and his morning blear turns into a broad smile as my face looms over his crib.
As I feed him, I flip open my laptop, and take a look at significant January 10ths in history. London is on my mind, having just returned from there to NYC. It's the 64th anniversary of the first meeting – in London - of the UN's General Assembly. It's also 137 years since the London Underground - in the form of the Metropolitan Railway - began operating. Collaboration, communication, technology…
I read a "Wired" piece about parents getting obsessive about tracking their infants' development using their iPhones, spreadsheets, toys that record audio, etc. As the iPhoneless father to energetic 5-month-old twins, I use perhaps rather quaint data capture methods: taking photos or videos, sending them the odd email. I shot their birth and first days on black-and-white film - 5 rolls that remain undeveloped. Will my children miss out on their place in the global elite because I didn't track enough data about them in the first few months of their lives? Will they grow to resent this lacuna in their biodata? Perhaps this is what is meant by the "internet of things" - 718,540 diaper changes recorded on iPhones.
OK - I do have a digital camera, and a Flip - and have a couple of thousand pictures, and several hours of video of the twins stored on a 1TB hard drive. I plug in the drive. It does not mount. It does not light up. It is dead. It has chosen a binary code date to give up the ghost. I am remarkably calm about this. Some data at least is on Flickr, YouTube – safe in the cloud.
Looking for meaning, I flick over to the Edge Annual Question: how has the internet changed the way you think? I don’t get long to reflect, as my internet connection is next to go down.
