lifeblog

a cell phone acts like your auxiliary brain. it’s almost permanently attached to either your hand or your hip or your purse, and sometimes you’ve even given up your land line completely in favor of it. so much of your life is conducted via cellphone. it could be a virtual diary, if only you could somehow record and extract all that information, all those voicemails and call histories and emails and instant messages and photos.

seems that nokia has figured out a way to do that. they’ve introduced software for their camera phones (which only is compatible with windoze peecee’s, booooooo hisssssss) called lifeblog, which basically records all correspondence and events that flow through your cellphone and then translate it into a timeline of your life, including all those IMs, emails, voicemails, calendar events, and photos.

think about it. wouldn’t it make sense to have a device that you already constantly feed information into, do the work for you?

i guess my question now is, how robust is this software? can you manually add to it? i conduct SOME of my life via cellphone, but not nearly enough to make an interesting diary. i’d like to be able to add to it by hand.

discover magazine wrote a really interesting article about lifeblog and the advent of photoblogging — how digital cameras are paving the way to passive diary-keeping — for their august 2005 issue (which i’d link to but it’s not online yet).

“It takes time to jot down a paragraph or two describing your day at the office, but it takes only a few seconds to snap a few images. And because visual memory is so powerfully associative, when you see these images 10 or 20 years from now, it’s likely that a whole host of other memories from that day will come rushing back. Perhaps not as many memories as you would have if you dutifully wrote out diary entries Samuel Pepys-style each night, but who has that kind of time anymore?” 

all of that brings up something i might have mentioned previously. even if you don’t think that you keep a diary, you probably do: your e-mail archive.

i’ve been using e-mail since 1994, obviously much more in recent years than at the beginning. i still have almost all my e-mail correspondence since 1996. i can go back and read it and it tells me so much about my life that i would have otherwise forgotten. and sometimes the mundane stuff is the most interesting. it tells me how my views and interests have changed; how i’ve become a better writer; it helps me remember when important things in my life happened.

i’m thinking about figuring out a way to publish my diary (just for myself; i don’t labor under the illusion that it would be interesting to anyone but me). it would probably be chronological, with a volume for each calendar year. it would include all my email correspondence, as well as any digital photos, photos from my phone, instant messages, and my blog, of course. somehow it would all have to be integrated in a way that was chronological and made sense. each volume would be HUGE, too!

i’ve been trying to figure out the point of doing a project that enormous. it’s not like i’d be doing it for anyone but myself. but that does remind me of something doc said when he encouraged me to start a blog three years ago: imagine how interesting it would be to read the diary of someone from 600 years ago. perhaps someone 600 years from now would find my diary just as interesting.

so what’s the point? i’m not sure, other than some narcissistic sense of self-fulfillment. i’d end up with a shelf full of books about my life. here’s something that just occurred to me: i’m convinced that humans are deeply and subconsciously driven to leave a part of themselves for future generations — it’s how we’re wired. most people meet that need by having children. but maybe some of us find a way to meet that need by leaving a record of our lives and experiences for others to read, enjoy, and learn from. so in lieu of having kids, i’m writing a diary? hmmm. sounds weird but makes sense, in a way.