There are terrible parts of my life I’d rather not have documented (a divorce, the sudden death of my best friend at age forty); or at least, when I recall them, I might prefer my inaccurate but self-serving human memories.

The real power of digital memories will be to trigger our human ones.

In “Funes, the Memorious,”

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,

The lifelogs remind me of Jorge Luis Borges’s story “On Exactitude in Science,”

When I turn my audio recorder off during an interview, people become more open and candid, even if they’re still on the record. People want their memories to be cued, not fully replaced; we reserve the existential pleasures of gently rewriting our history.

The trick is to encourage people to join in but also to think for themselves.

Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.

When informatics professor Gloria Mark studied office employees for one thousand hours, she found that they could concentrate for only eleven minutes at a time on a project before being interrupted or switching to another task—and once they’d been interrupted, it took an average of twenty-five minutes to return to their original work.