A Spork in the Road

Here’s an interesting example of the bizarre and very science-fictional results of creative ideas meeting technical requirements:

Report inappropriate memories by clicking here. Please give the memory number when reporting (the memory number can be found in blue text at the bottom of each memory).

I was reading The Cutest Auteur in the New York Observer online, about Sarah Polley and the film Away From Her, which Polley wrote and directed. When I went to the film’s website, one of the menu items was for a Memory Catcher — a brilliant idea, really, that collects memories from users, represents them graphically as snowflakes, and allows you to randomly view those memories.

The results are poignant and captivating. But of course, the obligatory “inappropriate content” safeguards are needed in this context, and hence we have inappropriate memories and blue text at the bottom of each memory. Stripped of context, the disclaimer quoted at the top of this post is a striking piece of prose.

The web developer in me admires the Flash programming of this piece — the way the snowflakes converge on the mouse pointer until you inevitably snag a snowflake, at which point the rest start to move away; the Brownian beauty of the swirling flakes; the integration of the trailer into the piece.

The creative writer in me wants to write the story about what memories are inappropriate, and why, and who has deemed them so.

The technical writer in me starts thinking about methods of cataloging memories — maybe WordPress-style tags would help for cross-referencing, and of course you’d need a timestamp and an index of important persons and locations…