Computer Scientist Tries To Document Every Second Of His Life ("Lifelogging")

[matcom]

<snip>

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Gordon Bell is a 72-year-old computer scientist with an eye for detail – every detail, in fact, that he's accumulated over the course of his life. A senior researcher for Microsoft, Bell is at the vanguard of a movement called "lifelogging," digitally storing every letter and photo, every phone call, email and video, every conversation, keystroke and scrap of paper, the entire minutiae of his daily routine, onto a hard drive.

He wears a camera around his neck, called a SenseCam that takes snapshots every minute of whatever may be in his path, including you if you happen to be standing there.

Gordon Bell is creating a complete virtual memory to supplement his own imperfect one, a defiant, Proustian reclamation of lost time that may be changing the very way we think about the past. But why?


GORDON BELL: Why?


BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah.


GORDON BELL: Why does anybody ever preserve anything? Is there any value to having a photograph of my mother at age three or so, you know, or a deed that I happen to have that would have been around in a shoebox that came from great-grandparents before 1900? So anything that, in fact, represents information, those things are all put in cyberspace, and those are the things that I think should be in cyberspace.

I go further than anybody else, which is to essentially really overtly get rid of anything I can that I can scan, and that includes coffee cups and tee shirts and mugs, you know, things like that, where I may want a memory of that.

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http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/01/05/07