Kevin Kelley on Lifelogging

Lifelogging, An Inevitability

The goal of lifelogging: to record and archive all information in one’s life. This includes all text, all visual information, all audio, all media activity, as well as all biological data from sensors on one’s body. The information would be archived for the benefit of the lifelogger, and shared with others in various degrees as controlled by him/her.

Some form of this total recall is inevitable, at least for some people. Partial recall from partial recording seems inevitable for the rest. We are all likely to record more and more of our lives.

Still the overriding concern is how to read, retrieve, and use this huge – and I mean huge – ocean of data that your life will generate. There’s one solution not normally offered in discussions of lifelogging that seems reasonable to me. Ten years ago computer scientist David Gelertner envisioned a new organizing metaphor for one’s growing cache of personal data. Instead of boxes and “windows” a lifelog should be centered on well, a life log, a timeline, chronological log of one’s life. "We're going from an artificial information storage scheme to a far more natural one. The idea of a timeline, a chronology, a diary, a daily journal, or a scrapbook is so much older and so much more organic and ingrained in human culture and history than the idea of a file hierarchy."