Fade to Play

Image: MARK RICHARDS (Gordon Bell portrait); PHOTOCOMPOSITION BY JANA BRENNING

In next month’s Scientific American there is an article by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell about Gordon’s MyLifeBits project at Microsoft in which he creates a permanent record of all aspects of his daily life.

Our research project, called MyLifeBits, has provided some of the tools needed to compile a lifelong digital archive. We have found that digital memories allow one to vividly relive an event with sounds and images, enhancing personal reflection in much the same way that the Internet has aided scientific investigations. Every word one has ever read, whether in an e-mail, an electronic document or on a Web site, can be found again with just a few keystrokes. Computers can analyze digital memories to help with time management, pointing out when you are not spending enough time on your highest priorities. Your locations can be logged at regular intervals, producing animated maps that trace your peregrinations. Perhaps most important, digital memories can enable all people to tell their life stories to their descendants in a compelling, detailed fashion that until now has been reserved solely for the rich and famous.

Relevance: What aspects of your life would you want to keep a record of and then relive? Maybe the last time you saw your best friend from grade 8 before they moved away? Or to hear the sounds of your last night at summer camp? In some sense, I am keeping a record of my life which is permanent through the online locations where I store information of relevance to me. I use my blog to store thoughts and content of relevance to my research, my flickr account to store photos, my del.icio.us site to keep my URLs found, and save alot of emails via gmail. I like how I am able to look back at aspects of my life and I know I would feel very lost if somehow all my digital photos disappeared.