contributed articles
Doi: 10.1145/1735223.1735243
book2 by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell outlined an enthusiastic view of
a future in which technology enables
“total recall” of our lives through “total
capture” of personally relevant information. Such information includes the
paper and digital documents we work
on or look at; email, paper mail, and
instant messages sent and received;
content of telephone conversations;
Web sites visited; and charge-card
transactions. Also included are data
from other everyday activities (such as
still images, video, ambient sound and
location data). Finally, these personal
archives might also be supplemented
with environmental measures (such
as light intensity and temperature
variation) and even internal, biosensor
data (such as heart rate and galvanic
skin-response measures) reflecting our
physical and emotional state.
Constructing such a diverse archive
of personal information requires a
range of technologies for its capture,
management, and storage. Today’s
advances in wearable sensors, networking capabilities, and massive
increases in digital-storage capacity
mean this vision is feasible, fueling
enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by the technology itself.
Further impetus comes from
speculation about what a comprehensive lifelog might do and how it
might change our lives. As outlined
in 2006 by Czerwinski et al., 9 lifelog-
BY aBiGaiL seLLen anD steVe WhittaKeR
Beyond total
capture:
a constructive
critique of
Lifelogging
Rather than try to capture everything, system
design should focus on the psychological basis
of human memory.
WhaT iF We could digitally capture everything we do
and see? What if we could save every bit of information
we touch and record every event we experience?
What would such a personal digital archive be like,
and how might it affect the way we live? This vision
of a complete “lifelog” is the holy grail for many
technologists and researchers who consider us to be
on the brink of an “e-memory” revolution.
In the past few years, capturing “Memories for Life”
has become a U.K. Grand Challenge in Computing
( http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/Grand_Challenges/
proposals/), and many research programs today are
dedicated to developing technologies to support the
archiving of vast amounts of personal data. A 2009
key;insights
focusing on “total capture,” current
approaches to lifelogging have failed
to explore what practical purpose such
exhaustive personal digital records
might actually serve.
evaluating new approaches, psychology
has emerged as an underexploited
resource in defining the nature of human
memory and its key processes and
weaknesses.
Psychology as design framework could
help define the types of memory such
systems should support, along with
their key interface properties and need
to work in synergy with human memory,
rather than as its replacement.
