The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. Today, we seem to be operating under a new and very different dictum: the unrecorded life is not worth living. Thanks to digital technologies, we now have the tools to chronicle our daily actions and thoughts in the minutest detail - and to share the record with the world.
The desire to bear witness to one's personal experience isn't anything new, of course. Long before words and pictures turned into strings of ones and zeroes, people set down accounts of events in their lives. They painted on cave walls, wrote in diaries, took snapshots and collected keepsakes and souvenirs. What's changed is the scale of the effort. Whereas in the past we tended to record only important events, today we can, and do, record pretty much everything. Nothing we do or think, it seems, is too insignificant to be preserved or broadcast.
The self-recording craze seems to have begun with the arrival of cheap camcorders in the 1980s, when interminable videos of weddings, holidays and even births became common. But it has exploded with the proliferation of mobile phones, digital cameras, personal websites, blogs and podcasts.
The trend with such technologies is to make it easier for us to capture and share ever smaller and more mundane fragments of our experience, in as close to "real time" as possible. Cameraphones allow us to become paparazzi, while new text messaging services turn us into monologists of the self.
Twitter, a free text broadcasting service that can be used with mobile phones or personal computers, puts a 140-character limit on the messages that can be sent. It appears to have been designed to give a gloss of importance to ephemera.
As surprising as it may seem, we're probably only in the early stages of this phenomenon. Big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Google, as well as many internet startups, are working hard to give us new and even more powerful tools for recording our lives. They want to make self-recording automatic, as natural as breathing. Their goal isn't just to sell us more computers and cameras; they know that the more details of our existence that we encode and send over the internet, the more they'll learn about who we are, how we act, what products we'll buy and what advertisements will catch our eyes. The more we reveal about ourselves, the more attractive we become as targets for marketers.
One of the great pioneers of self-recording is Gordon Bell, a legendary computer designer who started his career with the Digital Equipment Corporation in 1960. Now 72, Bell has for the past 10 years been creating an enormous digital archive of his life. As described in a recent New Yorker article, the archive already includes more than 100,000 email messages, 58,000 photographs, copies of every web page Bell has visited since 2003 and recordings of thousands of telephone calls. A word has been coined to describe what Bell is doing - lifelogging.
Bell is now leading a Microsoft research program, called MyLifeBits, aimed at developing devices and software for lifelogging. One product in the works is the SenseCam, a small camera with light and heat sensors that you wear around your neck. Whenever the camera senses a person nearby, or a change in the light, it takes a picture. If that isn't enough, you can also program the SenseCam to take a picture every few seconds.
What exactly is behind our rage to document the minutiae of our daily existence? That's hard to say. Maybe it's just another manifestation of modern-day narcissism. Maybe it's a byproduct of our media-saturated culture, with its sense that nothing's real until it's been recorded and broadcast. Or maybe it goes deeper than that. In striving to preserve the moments of our lives, to immortalise them, might we simply be expressing our fear of death?
As for Socrates, it's hard to imagine that he'd be pleased with any of this. We're so busy recording our lives that we have little time left to examine them. And perhaps that, more than anything else, is the real point.
· Nicholas Carr's next book will be The Big Switch. He blogs at roughtype.com
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