Experience vs. Memory

One question that continues to arise in our group's discussion of Participation TV is the idea of experience in contrast to memory or recording of that experience. There is the question of if we record or place a focus on documenting a performance, will it degrade the performance or experience in some way? Right now, it's hard to find an answer to that until we conduct some actual user studies.

But we can glean some idea from a recent TED talk given by Daniel Kahneman. He discusses the idea of an experiential self vs. a memory self. The idea is that the most important aspect of our memories is how they end, and that will determine how we remember that experience. And in a way, our memory self is pulling along the experience self just so we can get to the memories. He argues that it is important for us to begin understanding how we value experience versus memory.

This is both fascinating to hear, but also surprisingly intuitive. I consider myself a very "happy" person. But I also learned long ago to value memory over experience. I go out of my way to make sure I can remember details of the people I am with, or the performance I am seeing, or the vacation spot I'm at, just so I can remember them later. For me, a large amount of enjoyment comes well after the experience is over. I've always acted on this principle, and I feel it's been a good decision. This can apply to our project implementation as well. With a focus on both the experience and the memories created from it, we can better increase the user's pleasure with the performance and documentation.