Have you noticed that when something interesting happens, people no longer watch it, they film it. The moment is recorded to be stored away for future reference. This is known as life logging.
Life logging is the digital recording of daily life. Applications record, store and retrieve your digital material helped by AI. Photos of dinner with friends, a video of the busker on the corner, the map of your morning run, voice memos, emails, are all stored and tagged in the cloud.
Devices like the Apple Watch and Fitbit have brought life tracking into you everyday routines, along with a new vocabulary—the quantified self, body hacking, & personal informatics.
“Sousveillance” for filming the world around us, was coined by Steve Mann (a wearable technology expert). It plays on the French origins of the word “surveillance. Substituting “sous” meaning “below” for “sur” meaning above to suggest that wearable cameras bring observation down to human level.
Wearable devices record what you see and hear. Health trackers monitor heart rate, sleep, movement. Meals can be logged, your weight loss followed, steps counted. Your bodily functions are converted into data.
But life logging can be taken more seriously than social media sharing. We can use digital lifelogging for memory augmentation to create a “prosthetic memory”. Or it can be used as witness to your compliant behaviour—e.g. “alibi selfies”.
A pioneer lifelogger, Gordon Bell, led a project (MyLifeBits) from 1998 to 2007, where he archived nearly all aspects of his life. He scanned photos and books, saved e-mails and messages, and captured his life using a wearable camera.
The need to measure and record the self, predates personal devices. Experiments in “quantimetric self-tracking” go back to the 1970s, when enthusiasts began using wearable computers to monitor aspects of their lives.
But there is a cost—studies have found that taking photographs will reduce your memory of events. Images and videos can be highly effective memory cues but the act of taking the images distracts you from fully capturing the event in your memory.
Some people are starting to push back. They are looking for “analogue inspo”—spending time with friends, reading paper based books, newspapers and magazines, or listening to vinyl records or CDs.
After reading about the technologists trying to digitally augment our memories, I am left mildly amused. Like much created by Silicon Valley, their digital version of life misses the depth of human experience.
Memories are more than recordings of vision and sound. My flawed, unaugmented memory is also prompted by smells, flavours and textures. The most important memories I have are of the emotions of being around people that I care about.
And in that moment of danger when their lives should flash before their eyes, they may discover it is not in their heads at all, but at that moment completely inaccessible in the cloud.