New year, new diary – but how much do you really want to record about yourself? Add lifelogging hardware for endless possibilities, says Alun Anderson
JUDGING by the displays in department stores at the end of each year, the tradition of starting a new year with a new diary is still going strong, whether your diary is covered in luxurious leather, moleskin or card.
Curiously, though, the amount of space a diary allows for recording each day remains the same now as it was in the 1820s, when printed diaries first became popular gifts. A few hundred words is all you are likely to fit in, making the decision about what to record difficult and perhaps explaining why so many diaries remain unread – even by their authors. Maybe it’s time to ditch paper and its limitations, not merely for the digital equivalent but for something altogether more exciting and ultimately far more valuable and interesting. Look around and you can see two main directions shaping up.
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One approach is to think really big, and try recording absolutely everything that ever happens to you. That’s the idea of Gordon Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft’s research labs in Redmond, Washington. He thinks there will be no more worrying about what was important in your day once you realise you can store every detail of your life in a few terabytes of ever-cheaper digital memory.
If you decide to follow the approach taken by Bell in his book Total Recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything you will need a discreet camera permanently slung around your neck that can take photos at regular intervals, and a GPS device to record where you are at any time. Your phone calls, conversations and meetings will need to be digitally captured, all your emails stored, and every web page you look at downloaded. Then you will need to scan in any paper documents that head your way and refuse any books unless they are available on an e-reader.
With the help of a searchable database, your digital diary will then be able to tell you where you were, what you were doing, what you were looking at, who you were with and what you read at every instant of your life. Like Bell, you will be able to pull off stunning feats of memory, “recalling” what people said in chance meetings many years ago.
Tricks apart, doesn’t total recall risk turning into total inertia as the continually accumulating past overwhelms the present? Bell thinks not. The real result is “a tremendous feeling of freedom – and of security. By having everything in e-memory you don’t have to remember any more,” he says. “My view is that my memory really is my e-memory. My bio-memory is a URL and provides meta-data into the e-memory for any final record. I’ve got rid of a lot of clutter that I had to remember in bio-memory, but I have kept all the things that you can’t record, all the smells, all the experiential things are there. The e-memory gives me exactly where that experience was.”
Bell accepts that most of the moments he records are “mind-numbingly dull, trite, predictable, tedious and prosaic”. But the advantage of recording everything is the chance to know yourself in wholly new ways.
His vision for the future is of software that will let you sort and sift through your digital memories to uncover patterns you would never have gleaned unaided. Work, leisure and spending habits, the pattern of emotional response in various situations and around certain people, the numerous subtle factors affecting your mental well-being and physical health – just about anything you care to know about yourself can be chronicled, condensed, cross-correlated and plotted out.
That dream won’t be fully realised for a long while, but the idea that gathering data about yourself can lead to new insights is so powerful it has been taken up by a growing crowd of people who are taking small, practical steps towards achieving it. This “personal informatics” alternative to keeping a conventional diary is being boosted by enthusiasts who meet regularly in a number of cities worldwide – 13 at the last count – to share techniques at “Quantified Self” sessions.
“Gathering data on yourself can lead to insights you couldn’t get any other way”
“It is such a powerful feeling to watch these people in the meetings,” says Adriana Lukas, who co-founded the London QS meeting. “Personal data is a mine of amazing things about yourself which you are often the last to benefit from. The ability to monitor, collect and mine your data empowers individuals. Spotting patterns in your own life data is priceless.” She thinks QS is at the same stage as blogging was 10 years ago, with personal informatics set to go mainstream in two to three years. The goal is to transform the diary into a data log that allows you to become an observer of yourself. The idea is simple – anyone who has measured their weight every day understands it well – but the big change is the growing number of sensors available to record your every action.
Unsurprisingly, health and work are easy places to start. Sensors that automatically track exercise patterns are already common (DirectLife, for example), as are heart rate and blood pressure monitors. There are also sensors to monitor your sleep and dream patterns (Zeo), stress and mood (Q Sensor), and brainwaves (MindSet). And, of course, you can check the calories of any food using your phone (Tap&Track).
There are also keystroke programs to track your most productive moments, programs to analyse the way you use email (ClearContext), and others to record the patterns of your online interactions (Digital Mirror). Then there are tools to build a time line of your life in pictures, words and videos, software to help display moods and mental states graphically (Optimism, Moodscope, Track Your Happiness), and programs to record just about anything else you want as a visualisation (your.flowingdata, mycrocosm, me-trics).
Ian Li at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has a list of 187 of the tools available at . For many things you can record about yourself there are already online communities pooling results to look for bigger patterns, such as CureTogether.
Studying yourself could be dangerous, as you may find out things you would rather not know. Still, given the number of companies already trying to analyse the digital traces you leave so they can better control your choices, not studying yourself also has its risks.
Personal informatics may sound narcissistic but the desire to “collect and reflect” with the help of a digital diary is little different from the traditional diarist’s goal to remember and “know oneself”. Digital data has an overwhelming advantage: old-style diaries rely on you writing them, so they suffer from profound limitations. As Li points out, you can’t directly observe behaviours such as sleep, and you won’t have time to consistently record others, such as your activity pattern.
There is another profound source of error: how you “see” your day depends on your mood as you write about it – feel bad and failures and irritations will surface, while if a bad day ends in success, that’s all forgotten. So for the truly objective view of the day – and of you – following Bell’s “total recall” approach or using the burgeoning QS software may be the surer route. Welcome to The Real Me.
Profile
Alun Anderson is former editor-in-chief of żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ. He is the author of After the Ice: Life, death and politics in the new Arctic, and helps run the innovation news site Xconomy. A family photo-diary of more than 60,000 images (from 1875 to 2010) has given him a personal interest in seeking new ways to “mine the past’s lost futures”
