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Self-tracking is much broader than health. It is as big as our life itself. Tiny wearable digital eyes and ears can record every second of our entire day—who we saw and what we said—to aid our memories. Our stream of email and text, when saved, forms an ongoing diary of our mind. We can add the record of the music we listened to, the books and articles we read, the places we visited. The significant particulars of our routine movements and meetings, as well as nonroutine events and experiences, can also be funneled into bits and merged into a chronological flow.
This flow is called a lifestream. First described by the computer scientist David Gelernter in 1999, a lifestream is more than just a data archive. Gelernter conceived of lifestreams as a new organizing interface for computers. Instead of an old desktop, a new chronological stream. Instead of a web browser, a stream browser. Gelernter and his graduate student Eric Freeman define the lifestream architecture like this:
A lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. The tail of your stream contains documents from the past (starting with your electronic birth certificate). Moving away from the tail and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents—pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software. Moving beyond the present and into the future, the stream contains documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists.
You can sit back and watch new documents arrive: they’re plunked down at the head of the stream. You browse the stream by running your cursor down it—touch a document in the display and a page pops out far enough for you to glance at its contents. You can go back in time or go to the future and see what you’re supposed to be doing next week or next decade. Your entire cyberlife is right there in front of you.
Every person generates their own lifestream. When I meet with you, your lifestream and mine intersect in time. If we are going to meet next week, they intersect in the future; if we met, or even shared a photo last year, then our lifestreams intersected in the past. Our streams become richly braided with incredible complexity, but the strict chronological nature of each one means that they are easy to navigate. We naturally slide along a timeline to home in on an event. “It happened after the Christmas trip but before my birthday.”
The advantage of a lifestream as an organizational metaphor, Gelernter says, is that “the question ‘Where did I put that piece of information?’ always has exactly one answer: It’s in my stream. The idea of a timeline, a chronology, a diary, a daily journal, or a scrapbook is so much older and so much more organic and ingrained in human culture and history than the idea of a file hierarchy.” As Gelernter told a Sun computer representative, “When I acquire a new memory of (let’s say) talking to Melissa on a sunny afternoon outside the Red Parrot—I don’t have to give this memory a name, or stuff it in a directory. I can use anything in the memory as a retrieval key. I shouldn’t have to name electronic documents either, or put them in directories. I can shuffle other streams into mine—to the extent I have permission to use other people’s streams. My own personal stream, my electronic life story, can have other streams shuffled into it—streams belonging to groups or organizations I’m part of. And eventually I’ll have, for example, newspaper and magazine streams shuffled into my stream also.”
Gelernter tried many times since 1999 to produce a commercial version of his software, but it never took off. A company that bought his patents sued Apple for stealing his Lifestream idea and using it in its Time Machine backup system. (To restore a file in Apple’s Time Machine, you slide along a timeline to the date you want and there is “snapshot” of your computer’s content on that date.)
But in social media today we have several working examples of lifestreams: Facebook (and in China, WeChat). Your Facebook stream is an ongoing flow of pictures, updates, links, pointers, and other documentation from your life. New pieces are continually added to the front of the stream. If you care to, you can add widgets to Facebook that capture the music you are listening to or the movies you are streaming. Facebook even provides a timeline interface to review the past. Over a billion other people’s streams can intersect with yours. When a friend (or stranger) likes a post or tags a person in a picture, those two streams mingle. And each day Facebook is adding more current events and news streams and company updates into the worldstream.
But even all this is still only part of the picture. Lifestreaming can be thought of as an active, conscious tracking. People actively curate their stream when they snap a photo on their phones, or tag friends, or deliberately check-in to a place with Foursquare. Even their exercise Fitbit data, counting steps, is active, in that it is meant to be paid attention to. You can’t change your behavior unless you pay attention in some capacity.
There is an equally important domain of tracking that is not conscious or active. This passive type of tracking is sometimes called lifelogging. The idea is to simply, mechanically, automatically, mindlessly, completely track everything all the time. Record everything that is recordable without prejudice, and for all your life. You only pay attention to it in the future when you may need it. Lifelogging is a hugely wasteful and inefficient process since most of what you lifelog is never used. But like many inefficient processes (such as evolution), it also contains genius. Lifelogging is possible now only because computation and storage and sensors have become so cheap that we can waste them with little cost. But creative “wasting” of computation has been the recipe for many of the most successful digital products and companies, and the benefits of lifelogging also lie in its extravagant use of computation.
Among the very first to lifelog was Ted Nelson in the mid-1980s (although he didn’t call it that). Nelson, who invented hypertext, recorded every conversation he had with anyone on audio or videotape, no matter where or of what importance. He met and spoke to thousands of people, so he had a large rental storage container full of tapes. The second person was Steve Mann in the 1990s. Mann, then at MIT (now at the University of Toronto), outfitted himself with a head-mounted camera and recorded his daily life on videotape. Everything, all day, all year. For 25 years, if he was awake, he kept the camera on. His gear had a tiny screen over one eye and the camera recorded his first-person viewpoint, foreshadowing Google Glass by two decades. When we first met in July 1996, Mann sometimes called what he did “Quantimetric Self Sensing.” Because there was a camera half obscuring his face, I found it was hard to be natural around Mann, but he is still routinely recording his whole life all the time.
But Gordon Bell at Microsoft Research may be the paragon of lifeloggers. For six years beginning in 2000, Bell documented every aspect of his work life in a grand experiment he called MyLifeBits. Bell wore a special custom-made camera around his neck that noticed a person’s body heat if they were near and photographed them every 60 seconds. Bell’s bodycam also snapped a picture if it detected a change in light of a new place. Bell recorded and archived every keystroke on his computer, every email, every website he visited, every search he made, every window on his computer and how long it remained opened. He also recorded many of his conversations, which enabled him to “scroll back” whenever there was disagreement on what had been said. He also scanned all his incoming pieces of paper into digital files and transcribed every phone conversation (with permission). Part of the intent of this experiment was to find out what kind of lifelogging tools Microsoft might want to invent to help workers manage the ocean of data this lifelogging generates—because making sense of all this data is a far bigger challenge than merely recording it.