Chronicling a Life

In this week's New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson describes a man's quest to record his life in digital form. Gordon Bell of Microsoft has digitized his history: his paper documents, his e-mails, and his photographs. He wears a device called a SenseCam that automatically takes pictures of the people and places he passes, and he records his conversations. In this "lifelogging," everything is archived. The article provides an interesting reflection of the vagaries of memory and the ways in which we are teaching machines to sort and process information.

At the same time, I've been reading two books about the Buddhist concept of mindfulness. Those books advocate trying to be present fully in the moment, instead of obsessing over the past or worrying about the future. I wonder--if every aspect of your life is transformed by and into media, are you living mindfully? Or are you trying to turn mindfulness over to machines? Will such technology link us more strongly to our past and our experiences, or will it fragment us into bits of information that we no longer try to process for ourselves? Is there intrinsic value in trying to create our own narratives, even if those narratives might not match the documented past?

And of course, those questions lead to larger questions: Who are we, anyway? Our experiences? Our thoughts? What we see and feel? What is the best way to share our stories and our selves?