Life Blogging as Creating

May 27, 2007

The New Yorker this week has an article by Alec Wilkinson on Gordon Bell, a man who is trying to put everything in his life into digital format:

Bell’s archive now also contains a hundred and twenty-two thousand e-mails; fifty-eight thousand photographs; thousands of recordings of phone calls he has made; every Web page he has visited and instant-messaging exchange he has conducted since 2003; all the activity of his desktop (which windows, for example, he has opened); eight hundred pages of health records, including information on the life of the battery in his pacemaker; and a sprawling category he describes as “ephemera,” which contains such things as books he has written and books from his library; the labels of bottles of wine he has enjoyed; and the record of a bicycle trip through Burgundy, where he tried to eat in as many starred restaurants as he could (he averaged 2.2 stars per meal—“I do a lot of measuring,” he says).

My first response to this is to think about how useful this may be someday. Imagine a historian in 500 years looking back on the beginning of the digital age. It will be immensely valuable to know something about the way individuals used the web. Not just what sites were popular, but how people interacted with various pages. Other historians may be curious as to the rhythms of modern life. Anthropologists will love the treasury of daily scripts (what you say when ordering a coffee at Starbucks). For these reasons it is valuable to have someone like Bell recording in digital form everything about his life..

As I continued reading the article my interest in the project began to wane. The obvious issue is the incredible amount of information that is being amassed. Bell walks around with a SenseCam around his neck (pictured above), and this gadget takes photos of whatever happens to be in front of Bell. Day in day out there are thus photos that record a large portion of the minutes of Bell's life. Other piles of digital material are coming in from other sources. It sounds to me like a never-ending pit of data. Who is going to spend a lifetime looking through this record of every minute of another person's lifetime? Not me.

Then there came this:

...Bell and Gemmell would like software that organized the contents of the archive into movies—something, at least, to compress and shape it, to summarize its parts. “Auto-storytelling,” Gemmell calls it. “My dream is I go on vacation and take my pictures and come home and tell the computer, ‘Go blog it,’ so that my mother can see it. I don’t have to do anything; the story is there in the pattern of the images.”

Of course.. they need something like "auto-storytelling" because that would be the only way to add form to this mass of images, texts, and audio recordings. Since no one is going to browse a lifetime of random images, there needs to be an automated editor that selects and highlights what is of value. This should mean becoming a creator.. but Bell seems to have no interest in becoming one.

How would software give organization to all this minutiae of experience? It would undoubtedly take a generic storyline of people having a good time and mold the mass of data to that storyline. Or maybe there are a dozen main generic categories of experience to which the data could be matched. However this works out, we see here an example of making life more generic and more internally the same as everyone else's. Bell might eat at fancier restaurants than you or I, but our lives would share the same narrative dimensions.

Needless to say, this use of technology is the opposite of what we are working on here at Old Roads. We love the freedom that technology gives to forge narratives and identities for ourselves.. but this is done by creating those narratives for ourselves. The genius of the web is that everyone can become their own editor and creator.. not the hope that someday there will exist an automated editor for this information. Bell's data collection system seems geared to avoid the actual work of life: editing.

I am grateful that this kind of mass data collecting was not around earlier in history. What is most fun—and ultimately important—about reading travel narratives by writers like Ibn Jubayr or William Bartram is that they select information that they think is important. In other words we can glimpse their minds working and measure the way they evaluate the world around them.

We continue to define exactly what we are up to here at Old Roads, but we believe it is connected to creation. This is not a site dedicated to putting up a mass of information drawn from the details of our lives. Rather, everything here comes from a sustained effort to understand the world around us.. and to present our viewpoints in a way that is a new creation.