My So Called Digital Life
February 19, 2007 by francesca | permalink
If you could capture and store every minute of your life into bits, would you? The reality of creating a digital archive of one's life may be arriving sooner than you think. Gordon Bell is making sure of it with a MyLifeBitsProject. The growth of digital storage capacity has reached new levels, and today a $600 (US) hard drive can hold up to one trillion bytes of data, which should be enough to hold all your e-mails,web pages, papers and books, oh and you might as well throw in your iPod tunes and up to 10 pictures a day or 3650 a year for the next 60 years.
And if current trends continue, within a decade we will be able to carry all of the above on our cell phone's flash memory, while connecting wirelessly on our PCs. Fantastic, or scary, you be the judge. I can't help but think about what it actually means to carry the entire arc of our lives on a flash card. Will we all spend more of our waking time reliving the nostalgic best moments in life, and deleting the ones that don't live up to our expectations?
And while a new generation of inexpensive sensors are being created to record information about our health and physical movements, have the manufacturers actually investigated whether there is a latent consumer interest and demand for these products? While I can see the potential benefit of reading all of my body's vitals, often times (to my parents' disappointment) I don't get around to reading the daily newspaper, and wonder whether this will establish itself as the multi-vitamin in my life that I forget to take every morning. Vitabits, you might say, for the well-informed and well-connected.
