• by Kendall Allen , February 1, 2010

The concept of the memoir evokes mixed reactions -- as does the perhaps less romantic idea of the straight autobiography, the telling of one's own story in one's own terms. This ambivalence occurs even more in business, where we're torn on the accounting of history through a personal lens.

 

Someone very close to me, of high repute in business, is working on his memoirs -- but insists they are private, and demonstrates the proper level of deprecation whenever he even speaks of the project. I would love to get this published one day. His every story, no matter how small, enraptures the reader on numerous levels. But, our fraught conversations about his memoirs are constant reminders of the slippery slope of this whole genre, recalling issues of ego, bias, self-consciousness and of course outright reportage and verification.

This weekend, also following a week of iPad frenzy, I sat down with last week's New Yorker to read "Enough About Me: What does the popularity of memoirs tell us about ourselves?" by Daniel Mendelsohn. It turned my thoughts to the literally hundreds of conversations I've had with people in our industry about writing the book. That is, "the book" that is effectively our collective, exhaustive history -- the living, breathing history of the digital industry. These conversations -- which I'm absolutely certain many of you have also had -- are curious to experience. Depending on who's present, who's talking, and who's purportedly collaborating, you find yourself imagining how our autobiography would read under different pens.

I recall favorite reads that covered even the smallest slice of our history: books that revealed the inter-workings of notoriously bad deals and famous battles; the life and times of an array of media moguls and darlings; chronologies of trends; the roots of various disciplines. But there's one in particular I loved: "There Must be a Pony in Here Somewhere," by Kara Swisher.

There are many, but one account has yet to do it all. We treat our story in parts. But I do like to imagine someone taking on the whole of it, because people talk about doing exactly that. And I imagine how practically impossible this piece of work would be.

Musing this, I read as Mendelsohn's piece quotes Freud, pushing back on the suggestion that he write his autobiography: "A psychologically complete and honest confession of life, on the other hand, would require so much indiscretion (on my part as well as on that of others) about family, friends, and enemies, most of them still alive, that it is simply out of the question. What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity." If you look up mendacity, you'll see that it means untruthfulness.

As we ponder the larger story, we think about our own histories: proximity to the origins of the Internet; the growing familiarity with the relationship between media and technology; emerging platforms. We recall the first big ride up and the crash; the browser wars; famous duels and alliances; game-changing conspiracies; landmark deals  -- trends both small and profound concerning the thriving ecosystem in which we now do business and live. Covering the chronologies, the impact of influencers and their currencies -- how does this go down legitimately in one master work?

In order to do right by this potential book, its authors must be both historians and futurists, have old roots and a replenishing outlook -- and have seen some things and been some places.  It's fun to watch the dynamics in any given room of old-timers when the topic of "the book" comes up. There are knowing smiles, reference-dropping and rattling off of credentials -- crowd-sourcing of major proportions. 

We accept our mixed emotions on the memoir of digital. It can barely be written without bias, ego, and allegiances revealed. For, after all this time, if it is written, it should be the page-turner of all page-turners.