MyLifeBits

Went to hear a talk by Jim Gemmell of the MyLifeBits project today. MyLifeBits is a Microsoft BARC research project, explicitly conceived as realization of Vannevar Bush’s plans for the Memex as an information management system and repository. The guinea pig is Gordon Bell. He has accumulated, as the project description has it, “a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.” I’m currently writing about MyLifeBits in my chapter on hard drives and storage media, so it was good to have the opportunity to hear Gemmell’s talk.

It’s easy to play pocket postmodernist and wax skeptical about the enterprise. The language surrounding the project continually lobs hyperbole like “a lifetime store of everything” and “Gordon Bell is his data.” The project seems to recognize no meaningful distinction between born-digital media like copies of every Web page Bell visits and the physical media of his past and present surroundings. One prominent object in the collection is what Bell refers to as his $10,000 coffee cup, all he has left of a start up he had sunk money into. The coffee mug, Gemmell tells us, is now included in the repository. Except of course it isn’t—what’s included are representations and depictions of the coffee mug, in the form of digital photographs. When I pointed out this out Gemmell seemed to regard it as a small point and ventured that technology would soon allow for ubiquitous 3-D modeling. Hmmm. At some point it would be healthy for the project team to be honest with itself about what is actually being captured and retained here.

MyLifeBits also seems blissfully unconcerned with such matters as intellectual property, DRM, software standards, downstream compatibility, preservation, and other non-virtual realities of contemporary computation. The privacy issues alone are huge and scary: around his neck Gemmell wore an automated camera which uses an array of metrics and sensors to capture a photostream of the wearer’s day—neat, you can replay a kind of impromptu home movie of any given day’s events. Yet Gemmell brushed off questions about the legal and civil implications. It got even more interesting after the talk, when I went up to ask what happens when my desire to save a copy of every song I’ve ever listened to collides with the iceberg of DRM. At this point Gemmell said that ultimately MyLifeBits may not seek to preserve actual media content but rather metadata—what’s important are not the bits in the song itself, but a record of the fact that I listened to such and such a song on a gorgeous, 65-degree afternoon on such and such a day when I attended the MyLifeBits talk, etc. etc.—if I then wanted to hear the song the presumption is that there will be a digital service to make it available to me (for the appropriate micropayment). This is not, I think, a small point that should emerge only with a walk-up question after the formal presentation is concluded.

Nonetheless, MyLifeBits stirs something in me. We are, most of us, destined for 1 terabyte lives—this, Gemmell predicts, is all the media the vast majority of us will produce and consume on our mortal coil. Such is the cold calculus of modern data storage. But MyLifeBits includes a psychic counterweight, almost as an afterthought, in the form of a screensaver which Gemmell jokingly refered to as its killer app. The idea is that when your computer goes idle some random bit of your past—a video clip, a photograph—will appear on the screen. You can, if you like, sieze the moment to annotate it, adding metadata to enrich its value to the overall collection. There’s a sweetspot (Gemmell called it) in this spontaneous user interaction when you might be willing to reflect and comment on the media in a way that you wouldn’t if asked to carry out the task in some more formal, methodical fashion. And therein lies the poignancy: for here, at the screensaver, that thinnest of interfaces between storage and lived experience—so fragile that a mere keystroke or mouse touch will disturb its placid waters—is a reflecting pool on whose surface appear images of our personal past, images which we can accept and engage with (or else pass over and reject) in ways that depend entirely on chance, contingency, whimsy, mood, the local environment, the closeness of another, and all the other non-quantifiable unreproducible irreducibles that escape informationalization in the stark schemas of MyLifeBits. This is humanistic computing, warm, humane, and profoundly human.