I spent much of Saturday bumming around with Justin. We ate and walked and took lots of pictures but mostly we talked. And we talked about personal stuff, as friends are wont to do, speaking about dating and careers and money and politics and family and those sorts of things.

But we never did what I do with many other people, which is to say, "That’s off the record." or "That’s not for blogging." The omission of these disclaimers strikes me as unusual, especially as much of my image of Justin was formed back in the days when he’d swagger around naked on his website. So clearly, I know he’s much less prone to filtering his creative output on the web than I am. And it’s especially notable since I do ask for discretion from so many other people whom I hang out with.

But of course, he’s been doing the personal thing longer than any other human, over ten years now. And I’ve been blogging about half that long. So it makes me wonder if perhaps some of the fears that people have that all of this technology will cost us our privacy are unfounded. I think that perhaps as more of us become used to having lived our lives online, we’ll develop an innate understanding of what’s something we’re willing to digitally record and share with the world, and what’s inappropriate for publishing.

Of course, one of the topics Justin and I talked about was the idea of a personal panopticon, which would grab audio and video recordings of all of the things you experience in a day, and would let you hit a button to insert anchors in the media streams so you could use them as permalinks later. I think we both wanted to own one of these devices when they are eventually released.