Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Would You Feel About Recording Your Entire Life?
skade88 writes "As I get older, I find the little details of my life slip away from my memory after years and decades pass. I find myself wishing I had a way to record at least sound and video of my entire life. It would be nice to be able to go back and see what I was like when I was younger without the fog of memory clouding my view of the past. It would be cool to share with my boy friend and future kids how I was when I was younger by just showing them video from my life. Do y'all know of any good way to do this? I would settle for recording what I see from a first person point of view. There is also concerns that range beyond the technical. If I were to record my entire life, that would mean also recording other people, when they are interacting with me on a daily basis. What sort of privacy laws pertain to this? Even without laws, would others act differently around me because they were being recorded with my life record? How would it make you feel if your friend or family member did this?"
Google's Glass might one day accomplish what you're asking. I saw a kickstarter about facebook glasses that recorded but I'm not going to link to that as I don't think it was very
If I were to record my entire life, that would mean also recording other people, when they are interacting with me on a daily basis. What sort of privacy laws pertain to this?
So personally, I would use this only on my property and public property. And then I would separate the data between data from the property I was on and public property and just be mindful if I was sharing that the people in the public property video did not give their consent to be recorded. I think this means different things in different states so if you would tell us your state/commonwealth you could probably get better information. Personally, people would act weird if they knew they were being recorded and since it was for my own personal records and on public property I wouldn't see how it would come to light that I own it let alone archive it.
If you wanted to be absolutely respectful of other people I would suggest only using it on your property and then bringing a stack of waivers with you for people to sign before you started recording. Good luck!
My work here is dung.
The conspiracy nut in me says this is a not so subtle Google Glass ad.
At some point after you die someone will throw the hard copy in the trash and delete the digital to make room for porn
one long YouTube video!!!
Karma: Bad
If it were a family member? I'd probably break their recording device. Seriously. And if it were a friend, I'd probably be hesitant to hang out with them. The fog of memory is a good thing, usually. It helps you to remember the things you really enjoy about your friends and family, and forget the things that really drive you nuts. Also consider the legal implications for yourself if you have such a recording device. If you ever are suspected of a crime, or investigated, sued, or anything else, they will subpoena the video / audio from this device. It could be very detrimental to your case, and even used out of context against you. There is no reason to record every second of your life. When would you ever listen to your entire life again? Just do what most people do. Record those precious moments that you know you're going to have, and keep a journal about the daily/weekly/monthly things that you think are significant to you at that time.
fuck my life, i want to record my dreams
would others act differently around me because they were being recorded with my life record? How would it make you feel if your friend or family member did this?"
Yep, I know I would. I wouldn't want to be around you, and I'd be extremely formal and business-only when talking to you. If a friend or family member did this I'd be extremely annoyed with them.
...it's not a bad thing. It's not detrimental. The skill to forget is of extreme importance. You'll find that many serious psychological disorders stem from not being able to forget.
Consider modern-day home-security companies. "The comfort of knowing that you're safe." You'll find hundreds of companies offering you the ability to have cameras recording your front door, and being able to watch the video from your phone wherever you are.
Let's be very clear. "Feeling safe" doesn't mean that I get to watch my house all day every day. It means that I don't need to watch my house at all. I have no interest in viewing those cameras while I'm away.
As for your boy friend, and your future young goats, no one wanted to see your vacation slides last century. No one will want to watch your daily videos this century. It's that simple.
And, to be clear, no, I don't want you to record me.
A while back I saw an episode of Through The Wormhole that showcased just that. A professor and couple of students were recording snapshots of their lives for the last 3 years. Snapshots, because that's how our memory works and a picture is all we need to remember things and of course you would run into storage issues with 24/7 video recording...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Cut_(2004_film)
I understand exactly what you're thinking about here, but I'm a huge fan of not second-guessing the universe too much. I have such wonderful memories of my own youth...all seen through the rose coloured lens that is time, and frankly I suspect my memories are better than the real thing was. Better the only record I can muster is my own rose-tinted view of things. Every once in a while I remember the excessive dumb-assery that accompanied the great memories and shudder. I don't need a record of that.
Thus why I don't like recording anything to begin with. If it's worth remembering, you'll remember. If not, who cares. Nothing we do today will change the fact that in five billion years this planet will be a burnt cinder hurtling through cold space...yeah, that VHS recording of my first child's birth is really something to cherish. Actually, it's pretty freaking gross and pollutes the otherwise overwhelming emotion I can remember from that day. It's like I was there.
On the upside, I leave little evidence for others to use against me later ;). One person's way to remember the good times is another person's ammunition to strike at you with when you're down.
--
~AC
A few years ago, I started keeping a very detailed journal. It wasn't long before I came to the conclusion that a perfect memory, or a near perfect memory is generally a bad idea. You begin to live in the past, you begin using the information in ways it shouldn't be used, as evidence, as weapons, as a way to obsess about events, mistakes, ways you were wronged... It keeps you from forgetting things that should be forgotten and keeps you from forgiving and moving on. Even the good memories can be used to take you to daek places. This is why I no longer keep a journal and I can only imagine a perfectly recorded life would be that much worse. Of course, everyone is different, that's just how I am and I just caution you to be careful what you wish for.
Thierry Guetta done this, it was later made into a film called 'Exit Through The Gift Shop': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop about him following Banksy.
I been writting a journal since age 12, and all I been using is pen and paper. Going through the pages is faster than rewinding with a digital device. When you read through memorable moment many years later you will notice the the memories will flood back in, and even the smells of the moment will make it back. You don't even have to read the whole to thing you wrotem just a few snipets and your brain will fill in the blanks. Also written journals are more collectible than digital files, so if your family does not read it after you pass some stranger will.
.. someone else will have to be listening to it all. (not you)
Even in the "old" days we did it with camcorders, cameras and cassette recorders. You get that all in phones, portable games consoles or a laptop now. I would use something like google glass though. You'll look stupid, it's in the cloud and can disappear at any time and google is an advertising company so you'll no doubt be tracked and monetized.
It would sure help with arguments with my wife
Yes, you could win them all and be divorced in no time.
As I get older, I find the little details of my life slip away from my memory 15 minutes after something happens
Fixed that.
Life needs more saving throws.
This kind of technology is considered in UK Channel 4's excellent series Black Mirror in an episode called An Entire History of You. It looks at the ups, the downs, and the irritating social faux pas that will certainly emerge if we have such a technology. Highly recommended.
My daughter is 2 years old and I don't know how many hours of video there are documenting her life. What I find is when I go back to said videos, my actual memory of her as a newborn is replaced by a memory of what's on the video. Sometimes it's just better to remember the experience as it was.
I would like for a way for videos and and photos to be locked up for many years and only be accessible when the distant memory of her as a newborn is all but forgotten.
Two reasons:
First, I like to remember my life the way I remember it - not from some video recording. It just seems cold and impersonal - nothing can capture what I was thinking and feeling at those moments.
Second, oh my God it would be boring. There is so much down time, so much wasted space, so much mundane. Have you ever heard someone singing with headphones on - live? Have you ever compared that to the final, fully produced version? I don't care how good a singer you are (and I know some very, very good singers) - there is no may it will measure up.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My did got a VHS camcorder in the 1980s and spent a significant amount of time and money on tapes to record as much as he could of my and my sisters' significant life events - proms, sports, graduations, weddings, etc. To this day, those VHS tapes sit there decaying, never watched. It seems like everyone is too busy living their current lives and experiencing the present to have time to start delving into even the "important" moments of the past. Photos? Sure. Video? Hasn't happened yet. Maybe I'll be proven wrong some day.
As I get older, I find the little details of my life slip away from my memory after years and decades pass. I find myself wishing I had a way to record at least sound and video of my entire life. It would be nice to be able to go back and see what I was like when I was younger without the fog of memory clouding my view of the past. It would be cool to share with my boy friend and future kids how I was when I was younger
So are you talking about showing your kids this archive when they are older? Or are you talking about kids you've yet to have? I ask because if you are still young enough to have kids and are already forgetting so much you may want to seek professional help. Or are you more concerned with how getting older changes your perspective on things? If so, then you could simply do what people have done for hundreds of years (or longer), start keeping a journal. Or do a frequent video journal or something.
That being said, I'd like to do this too. That way I can replay what I said to my wife to finally prove to her that what she thinks she heard is not what I said. Or so I can know once an for all if I'm nuts and my memory has gotten even worse than I thought.
skade88 writes "As I get older, ...
isn't it a little late to think about it at 88?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
When I am old and decrepit, I would like to look back fondly through my revisionist memory and think of the good times - whether I had them or not.
As my grandmother once said, "Don't confuse me with facts - I know what the truth is."
where would you keep it?
Documenting your entire life sounds interesting until you realize you could spend the entire REST OF YOUR LIFE reviewing it recursively.
To me, that sounds like a dumb proposition. Or perhaps incredibly egotistical. I might've been interested in a few interesting things my late mother did, but honestly, I prefer her description of it with her interpretation and memory. I wouldn't want to even see what happened, as that would ruin it.
However, some folks have set up webcams in their houses which could get recorded (I know of one that started nearly 10 years ago), and even Google glass is taking beta applications now for everyday life stuff. Just be aware of the privacy considerations.
St Peter will have all the recording you need...
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
A device has been created for this. You are looking for the http://memoto.com/
This is what diaries are for. Primitive I know but it's amazing how those little narratives jog the memory.
One of the best things about growing up is being able to forget (or deny) what an idiot you were when you were younger. Surely, our mistakes make us what we are today, yet people persist in judging others by the mistakes which were made and not what someone may have become after having committed them. We too often presume a person *is* the mistakes of their past and that a person can never be more than he is today. What a pathetic way of seeing things... but then again, most people see things through their own eyes... the eyes of a person who lacks the ability to change, improve or to learn.
When I travel, I almost never take pictures. This is probably an over-correction on my part, but I cannot get over the way so many spend so much time taking pictures that they never pay attention to where they are, to what they're doing. If too much effort is given to it, the need to record everything can overcome the very experiences one wishes to record. The best things cannot be captured in stills or in video, but even if one is there it may be missed if one neglects the world for the sake of a 1.5" LCD on the back of a camera.
For the one who wishes to record everything, I would wonder if he has fully considered why. I would be concerned that it derives from an unaddressed discomfort with mortality and this inhibits present unhappiness. The one who records everything is anxious about the future, lest he should then forget or be forgotten in it. When he reviews the past, he forgets the very moment he lives in. Either way, the present, the only thing we can really do anything about and the only moment in which we can find happiness, is neglected.
I can imagine a handsome young man who marries a beautiful girl. He is captivated by her and they take many pictures together. But as he gets older, their youthful beauty fades. The man looks continually at the pictures with a sense of loss, not having learned to love what he has in the moment he's in. The girl he married is in those pictures and has passed away long before either of them die.
We can never find happiness in this life unless we have peace. We can never find peace until we accept our mortality. And once we realize that we will die, and that no amount of recording will change that, then we may understand the importance of the moment we're in. When we've paid attention to the life we're in, however, we have some hope of being ready for death, for we may then know we've lived life for what it was worth.
Marry someone, and spend the rest of your lives helping each other remember who you are and what you've done.
Fifty years from now, you'll be able to look back at everything you've done together --- and realize what a terrible idea that was in the first place, but at least now you have someone to commiserate with.
I know it sounds pretty harsh but I would find it uncomfortable to be around someone recording at all times. Over time I would find more and more reasons just not to come by and eventually would not see you at all anymore.
I don't really like the idea of being watched all the time and I don't like sharing personal information that I don't have to share. I don't do facebook, twitter, or any other social networks and being around someone that was recording constantly would just be way too invasive.
If my family did this I would probably only talk to them over the phone or email.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
A shameless plug, but check out my android app: Tiny Travel Tracker http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rareventure.gps2_trial&hl=en
You can store your GPS path for your entire life in an encrypted database on your phone. I found it really useful for remembering things I'd otherwise have forgotten. "Oh yea, I went to *that* bar, now I remember"
If you're not already recording your life events on Facebook, I'm sure your friends are having a pretty good go at doing it for you!
The problem is that the law treats recording devices differently from your brain. Anything artificially recorded on a personal device is not sacrosanct and is subject to seizure. Who knows what will happen to privacy once machines can actually read everything in your head. And then you have "augments" that will incorporate incorporate electronic and biological enhancements to their brain. If you have a flash chip in your head the data will likely be seizable.
Taking all that even further it may become practical to rewrite memories in a brain or even bypass them to rely only on artificial memory mechanisms. Governments will then be able to outlaw thinking. Imaging being forced to sit in a chair to have your memories reviewed and if they don't like them changed. A country like Iran or North Korea would love that.
... as you continue to grow older you will eventually reach a point at which your distant past will once again become crystal clear -- like it was just yesterday!
What I would like is a "photographic memory" (with all the other senses too!) and a magic device that upon my death, would record all of my memories and have those memories stores, un-viewed, until everyone alive when I die and their children and grandchildren had been dead for several hundred years.
Imagine the fun historians could have a millennium from now if they had access to 7 billion people's perfectly-recorded memories.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is anecdotal, but I usually associate memories with songs... So every year, I try to find a good song I like, and just attach memories with it, and put that song away in an album and not listen to it for a couple of years. Just play that album again later and the memories come flooding back. I find it to be quite nice.
I have a friend who's kept a journal for longer than I've been alive (well, maybe not quite that long but still a long time) and it can be very interesting hearing his take on events from the before time, uncolored by 20+ years of failing neurons.
A 24/7 video record is pretty pointless. The purpose of recording the events of your life is to record the interesting events of your life, not sitting on the pot for 20 minutes trying to squeeze out a grunter.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal RIchelieu
So how long would it take going through those recordings to find something...
But don't worry, our technological society is evolving to that point asymptotically -- you probably already carry a tracking device in your pocket that also can be used to make phone calls; if you drive a recently manufactured car it has a rat box in it that your insurance company can use to try to avoid any liability, and there are proposals for future model years to make that rat box collect even more information. Sound and pictures will get there eventually.
Counterargument: what if you recorded the worst-case scenario? Accidentally viewing that video of your child being hit by a car could be devastating. And I can see too many people obsessing over re-watching those 'happy memories' (now gone sour) of ex-girl-or-boy-friends. This latter point - and many other interesting ones regarding this idea taken to an extreme - were covered in the quite decent mid-90's quasi-cyberpunk film 'Strange Days'.
For those who haven't seen the film (no real spoilers here, I'm describing something that happens in the first 15 minutes): the film describes a future in which a banned underground technology allows the direct recording of one's memories. The main character (the perennial 'loser' type) is a guy who illegally sells recorded memories on the black market. He can never emotionally get over the fact that his bitchy ex-girlfriend dumped him because he constantly sits alone in his apartment replaying memories of the good times, when he and she went rollerskating, or were bumpin' uglies.
Part of moving on to the next event in your life involves not necessarily forgetting the past, but sort of 'shelving it' and not replaying it over and over. Wounds will always be fresh in your mind if you have an instant replay button.
Wow! I have few enough seconds waiting for me in the future without wasting them reviewing my past. Frankly, I'm going to enjoy the moments I have waiting for me, not the dusty days gone by.
Focus on the now. Forget the past - it's gone and there's nothing you can do to actually relive it; don't worry about the future - it will be here in a minute, anyway.
That is all.
As if it was so simple, record everything and nothing will be forgotten. Even assuming that recording everything is technically possible and legally or morally acceptable, how are you going to find the moments you cherish? Was it two months ago or five, that you had this wonderful sex ending in some earth-shattering climax? Or was that last year? Was little Timmy 3 or 5 when he was so cute losing the fight against a roll of toilet paper, and was that in that motel in Lake Tahoe or in Chattanooga? Anyone having a huge collection of pictures will attest, that finding one specific one you can dimly recollect is a huge task.
And then, even if you manage to find that even, times over times it has been proven, that people photographing or videotaping some event are later disappointed how bland the recording was and not matching the remembered reality. The brain is constantly editing and enhancing impression to create memories, but who's going to do that with your life recording? Taking good still-photographs that are emotionally gripping is already hard enough and needs training and experience - flickr is a testimony on what doesn't work for most part - video is even worse, not even counting cutting and post production. A life-recording that isn't edited will be of horribly low quality and have nearly no value watching.
If you want to show your future loved ones how you were in college, don't clobber them with 1200 days of 24 hour recording. Make the effort and get a few representative images or short videos which communicate the essence of this time.
As to how I feel if someone recorded his whole day including the time we spend in bed together? I couldn't care less.
You need to make sure you have nothing on record that the statute of limitations hasn't run out on.
Yes, there are times in my life that I know are probably forever lost to me on account of the "fog of memory" (awesome term for it, by the way), and I have to admit that at times I really do wish I could remember some of those points in my youth far more vividly, but I'd be hesitant to hand responsibility of remembering my daily experiences to a computer, because that would mean I, myself, would not have as much need *TO* remember. And, as the saying goes, if you don't use it, you lose it; I am fairly certain that a user of such technology would find all too soon find that they wouldn't even be *able* to remember almost anything without, other than things which would ordinarily stand out in one's memory anyways.
I can't help but think of the ending of Stream of Consciousness.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Seriously, it's easy enough to spend more time locating, prioritizing, and cataloging media than simply enjoying it without crap like this.
Music, movies, books, photos, etc. More media is definitely not what I need in my life. I'm drowning in it as it is, and enough of it is more interesting than what I did today that I doubt I'd run out of good media to enjoy (to say nothing of actual experiences in the real world) in a dozen lifetimes, even if no more were produced starting today.
People spend hundreds to thousands of hours and shitloads of money organizing, annotating, and preserving family photos and videos, largely to no long-term end (two generations later, "who the fuck are all these people?" *throws out several boxes of photo albums*).
If you want to record your life, be ready to spend all your free time editing it and adding metadata so it's useful, or before long it'll just be a bunch of files and a hopelessly-large chore to organize it all. If you're an early adopter of this sort of thing maybe it'll be preserved by others (certainly some things like this would be important to historians) but you won't get much use out of it personally unless you're willing to devote tons of time to it.
Ever edit a wedding video? Imagine that, but a billion times more boring.
The primary plot of Robert J Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax is about a quantum rift that allows travel between our world and one where the Neanderthals ended up out-competing Homo Sapiens. However it postulates the Neanderthals developing a very different society from ours, including exactly the kind of "record your entire life" technology you're talking about.
The books make it sound like a great thing... if your entire society and legal system is set up to deal with it. Trying to get there from our current society however would involve a lot of pain and difficulty, both because of the personal expectations of privacy and our current nosy legal system.
(Note that the above wikipedia link is quite detailed. If you've got the time and interest it would be better to skip that and read the books.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I personally can't stand listening to recordings of myself, I sound like a complete idiot!
spy's / secret areas and what say some edits / hacks a video to make you look guilty of crime then what?
wait I think part 2 was part of a movie or a tv show.
"Yes! That's right! Everything you know is wrong!"
Ha! I knew it!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The question has to be, when does the value of your life (time) exceed the value of the time spent re-watching your life. If you spend 5 minutes watching 5 minutes of your life that you have already lived, then you have spent 10 minutes living 5 minutes of your life. This would seem like a bit of a waste of 5 minutes. Life is precious and there isn't much of it so don't waste it watching or doing things you have already done. There is no point in this at all.
I need an AI to watch the video for me, erase the boring stuff and duplicate things, and flag and tag everything else based on date & time & categories and people involved, transcribe all conversations, do OCR on everything in front of me, plus make a nice searchable index.
Otherwise I'll never be able to find anything interesting out of the giant heap of boring in my life if I'm ever so lucky as to have something worth reliving actually happen to me.
The Final Cut
the idea has been explored in depth
The Admin and the Engineer
"You got lights, you've got cameras - bitchin' technology!"
Watching back your life will literally take a lifetime worth of time to do. Not to mention how long it would take to edit it into something comprehensible.
Here's a suggestion: Live your life and look forward instead of focusing on how you can dwell harder. Spend more time doing things you love instead of remembering the things you used to love.
I believe that a well curated record of a personal past could stifle social development. People tend to believe that their present self developed rationally from their past views and experiences. We recite memories that fit well into a narrative that supports our idea of ourselves as it stands today. Those memories are false. They are constructed as they are "recalled" out of a loose framework that is filled in by present information. If we are constantly reminded of our actual past beliefs, we may be influenced by a misguided sense of integrity to honor those younger beliefs and stay rigid in the face of new experience. To combat this, since I believe the documentation of or lives is inevitable, I suggest society begin actively promoting change over integrity in personal relationships.
Go watch Strange Days (1995)
I'm not so interested in recording all of my life, but I'd love to have at least a 30 minute buffer of recording going at all times. Then when something cool happens, I can tap my Google Googles, or whatever the tool turns out to be, and have that bit saved.
I couldn't think of anything worse! There are many good reasons why large parts of my life are forgotten. It's not easy forgetting all that stuff that I'd rather not remember.
Having it all recorded in other people's memories is the ultimate nightmare.
Apart from immediate family I don't think I'm in touch with anyone I knew 20 years ago. And that's the way I like it.
It's not easy being a fool.
The past is dead.
The future is unknowable.
As for the present... I forgot to bring one.
Imagine yourself, watching a recording of your past self, who's watching a recording of your past self, who's...
Try Black Mirror S01E03 ;)
"As I get older, I find the little details of my life slip away from my memory after years and decades pass."
You're a 25 year old gay man, for god's sake. If you have problems now, you won't need them videos later because you won't be able to find them.
Also, you're already all over the internet with your personal crap, nobody needs more, especially not us.
Get over yourself. Your life is just not that interesting. The only person who would think so is you, and I bet even you would find rewatching long tracts of it would make you realise how boring you really are. We all are.
And what about the filming of the parts where you are rewatching stuff you filmed earlier? It's all just going to disappear up its own butthole.
"It would be cool to share with my boy friend and future kids how I was when I was younger by just showing them video from my life."
Spare us. Nobody gives a shit about your life, much less your past one.
You'll never have kids.
You're already everywhere, from Reddit to Tripadvisor, from Facebook to Twitter and all those between.
We don't want to see nor hear you.
Just go away and die.
There's a famous quote by someone-- "If most of us had to sit through a movie of our lives, our main emotions would be boredom and embarassment". That's the first thing I think of whenever this topic is brought up.
The second thing I think of is-- how did I spend my time yesterday, and how would that look on a video? Boredom and embarassment, yes, that seems pretty accurate. (Especially since I'm getting over a cold, and spent most of yesterday blowing my nose and watching Season Five of The Shield).
Which raises an interesting question. How would I have spent yesterday if I knew I was filming it? Would I have goofed off less, and spent more time doing things that are exciting, productive and/or admirable? I don't know. It's hard to believe that knowledge of being filmed wouldn't have had *some* effect on my behavior.
...I think this one is the best (as opposed to the ones that are a photo for every day of one's life): http://vimeo.com/40448182
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
Why don't you try it for a week with a video camera? Then wait a wait a year. Then see how much of that week you want to sit and watch again.
Most people's lives are the same ordinary as most other people's lives. An hour a week maybe. What is it about your life that would make me want to give up a lot of mine to watch lo-fi re-enactments of yours?
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
On New Years Day 2010 I set my self the target of publishing one snapshot a day on my personal website, as a means of recording what I was doing that day.
I've been keeping it up, publishing about 20 snapshots a month (it's more difficult than it seems, especially when you're in a work/sleep rut ;) ). And I enjoy looking back at them and remembering what they relate to.
It's not about the detail on the photograph (there are usually no people in it) or the quanitity (there's never more than one for a day) but each one acts as an 'anchor' to events in the past. Even simple things, like the staircase of the building where I work, my old car, flowers in spring, a birthday cake, can bring back a pallette of feelings and memories.
Stachel
My Dad sends an email to his kids every Sunday morning with what he's done that week. He looks at the calendar, uses the appointments written down there to jog his memory, and then punches out about a pages worth and sends it to us. This is possibly the best way to go about remembering your life. If you don't have the resolve to accomplish this about 48 weeks of the year I doubt you'd be able to accomplish your goals.
I really don't want to record some of my poops.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
You want to record your ENTIRE life? When will you have time to watch it?
Jenna Marbles pooping
Seriously, it'd be the most boring thing ever. over 95% of what you do wouldn't be interesting to anyone at all, including you. The other 5% will probably only be interesting to people that don't have any good intentions with those recordings, or at least the intentions you are hoping for. The small bit that you are interested in yourself, will probably differ from your memories and the cameras never catch the good bits from the right angle.
It'll be just like Jenna Marbles pooping. Nobody would be interested in that, including herself, apart from a few fetishists and people that want to check she's not pooping in places where it's illegal.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
During xmas holidays in 2009 I wrote a small Linux script that would take a webcam picture once every 5 minutes. Then I set up a webcam in my living room, and I mostly have the whole year 2010 recorded from my living room. I spend too much time watching TV :-(
Sometime early 2010 I also wrote a ffmpeg script, that is run with cron every midnight, and it compiles all the daily pics into a time lapse video. They are the only way I can view the material - there is loads of it. Running "ls" on the directory with the pictures takes about 5mins, so I strongly recommend you put each day in a separate folder.
Who will watch this stuff? I don't know, I just do weird projects for fun.
Zippy?
The very act of recording, changes the perception and present. So you're not really recording what you would've experienced if you were NOT recording.
You're really recording what you're recording, and that is really really sad, and far from the reality you're hoping to catch.
Just repeat after me: There is no true objectivity. Never was, never will be.
And: The more you hold onto life, the less you truly enjoy it. Just let go!
Wow, so I can't believe how un-helpful most of the posts in response to this have been, Mostly of the "forgetting is good" variety. I'll get to that later, but first, on the technical front.
;) If nothing else it can be used to "fill in gaps" in my mind if it's damaged in Cryo-storage. Yes.. I'm a transhumanist. :P
I myself have been trying to do this for the last decade or so. Some devices you might like to look into.
http://www.looxcie.com/
Pretty light head mounted camera. Can record about 8hrs of footage at lowest Res. I had to hardware hack it and attach a bigger battery as it runs out before it runs out of recording. Every night I slurped off the recording to my Mirrored raid "lifelog" drive at home. Look into some good VJ software. Almost any good VJ software has the ability to tag and index parts of a video. If something noteworthy happened in the day I'd take 10 min in the evening to jump to it and tag it in the SW. (hence for future search of little Timmy being cute)
Basically if you want to go 24/7 (actually just when you're awake) you'll need to build your own rig. I recommend a pinhole camera from a spy shop online. They make cameras that look like buttons you can integrate into your shirt. A Raberry Pi and a huuuge SD card will get you a days recording. In the evening pop the SD into the PC and have an auto-sync pull the data to your big redundant life array.
The only thing that's kept me from keeping this up is storage. Even LQ video and mono audio and you're looking at gigs a week. It adds up really fast to about a HD a week. Not sustainable. As soon as Drives get bigger I would be doing this for sure.
Why? So if I die the future super beings can pretty faithfully recreate me from the records. My future simulated me will be way better resolution than the rest of you jokers.
I'd like to record my life at 33 and play it back at 45, so everyone would sound like a chipmunk. Simon! Theodore! Alvin!!
This small camera takes two photos every minute and also stores your GPS position along with the photos. http://memoto.com/ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/martinkallstrom/memoto-lifelogging-camera
Even without laws, would others act differently around me because they were being recorded with my life record?
If reality TV has demonstrated anything, it is that being recorded 24/7 and peered at by millions of people makes you less adventurous, more respectful and more caring of others.
Is that better or worse then lose them all and remain married?
My biggest worry in life is that I don't manage to live enough. When we die, we just cease to exists, I think, so it is important to live while you are here. It may be nice for you descendants to have some memory, but IMO the best gift one can give one's children is a good set of skills for life - not just a formal education, but how to handle all the other things life throws at you.
Personally, I'm not much in favour of leaving a cold headstone behind - I'd hate to think of the waste of money on something like that. It would be a nice thought if my ashes were buried under a nice tree somewhere in a place not too near a city development, so it could grow on and be beautiful or useful for a long time.
...well not new exactly...but imagine all those moments (pick your own fetish) edited together, over and over and over.
Quite honestly, and this question can be asked about bloggers, facebook users, twitter feeds and quite a few people that published memoirs over time, I wonder what makes someone think their life is so earth-shatteringly interesting that they need to record it all for posterity.
The average life contains a lot of very, very dreary and dull moments. In between the interesting bits, insofar as there are any, most of us lead a life that is decidedly mundane and uninteresting, present writer included. The notion of recording it all not only suggests narcissism to the point of being megalomaniacal, but is also in jolly bad taste.
Have we, as a species. evolved to the point where we are prone to such self-important wind-baggery that we need to subject our environment to every brainfart that crosses our mind? Quite frankly, the last thing I want to subject my son to is the image of me as a kid or teenager. I'd settle for raising him to be wise and kind, and the rest is irrelevant gravy.
The fact is that when I die, I cease to be. And people will remember me for a variety of reasons, be they good or bad. A recorded lifetime takes a lifetime to watch, which seems to me a gigantic waste of one's life.
Greetings and Salutations
I would suggest one of two options.
1) Carry a small, digital recorder with you, and, every so often record a few comments about what has been going on.
2) As a meditation and contemplation technique, take some time at the end of the day to type some notes into a document about the day and its events. Keeping a day book like that can allow a person to filter out the useless stuff and only keep the good stuff. after all, who really wants to see hours of walking down the sidewalk, or, sitting at a desk, shuffling papers.
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
"How would it make you feel if your friend or family member did this?"
:) anyway, I wouldn't like it. I'm not living in someone else's reality show. If someone does this, I want them to have a clear indication that they're doing it, e.g. I don't want unnoticeable Google Glasses, quite the opposite, I want them to be clearly noticeable. While you might allow some or most of your activities to be recorded, it's important that you know about it, always. Especially when the recorder is not someone you know, and/or the service that is used to record and store the footage has privacy policies that can change by the weather.
Easy, I'd kick them out of my sight, or, kick myself out from their sight
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/12/10/1510221/sensecam-aids-patients-with-memory-problems
took me too long to track down though
it's been done.... mostly for the alzheimer & similar afflicted...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Go to a concert. Stand in the back and try to see the stage. Hard isn't it? That because too many people won't live in the moment, and would rather record it for watching it later. So a concert today is mostly thousand of hands in the air, recording everything, and at the same time blocking everyones view of the stage.
I would guess it also would make a bigger gap between extroverts and introverts. As a natural introvert, I do not act natural in front of a camera. I would feel pressured and uncomfortable.
Besides, how would I as a potential passerby in your life request you delete footage of me? You might want to record everything, while I and many with me do not want to be recorded.
... the better it was.
God: An invisible friend for grown-ups.
I once had a colleague that walked around with this A4-sized (close to Letter size for you USians) hardbound notebook. He took notes of telephone conversations, in-person conversations, meetings, and other significant events. At the time he had just completed some civil court case, where there was some disagreement about certain events a couple of years in the past. He proceeded to pull out the relevant journal, and could provide a much more detailed version of the events (in his favour, of course) including dates, times and actual discussions.
At the time I thought it is cool, but one certainly has to decide how much or how little one needs to record. In my own experience (e.g. meeting minutes) one often disregards little side points that at the time seem unimportant, but become crucial at a later date. On the other hand, recording EVERYTHING might not be practical (depending on technology), as one could spend your whole life just "recording".
The extreme example would be: recording that you where recording that you where recording....
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
People forget what it was like prior to the internet when you went to your neighbors for dinner and they brought out the slide projector or 8mm projector to show vacation pictures or their child's play or recitle, etc. We all sat through those dreadful slide shows and movies, being polite, but face it, nobody really cares about your life, at least not as much as you think they do. They may care about you, but not every detail of what you do. Your grandparents understood this. They had a picture or two of key events to hold the memory. Memories are important, not documentaries.
Forget recording. Writing a diary is a good way to enhance your skills at language manipulation, introspection, and self-reflection. Recording brings you nothing of all these.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
... for many reason. Let them fade.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
You should spend whatever time you have left looking forwards not backwards.
Memoto is the only product I know of that is actually targeted at consumers for life logging, but it's rather low tech as it's only pictures from what I understand. Taser Axon Flex is another product and can do full video, but it's geared for police use, not consumer use. Once released, Google Glass might of course be the obvious solution, but so far Google hasn't really said anything if it actually supports life logging, as all the demo videos so far had the user trigger the record, it's also not known if the battery life will be enough for life logging.
Don't really know if there is anything on the software side with good support for life logging. Making the pictures is the easy part, finding the picture you are searching for in hundreds of thousands of images is not so easy. So something with face/voice/text recognition for automatic tagging would be interesting. Memoto seems to come with some apps, but no idea how good they are.
I wholly agree with your aspiration - something that I am quite keen on myself.
With this years trend of wearable technology and the near-term release of stick-on body sensors, we are really close to having the sort of hardware technology that enables this. I believe that although recent hardware releases makes great headlines, we are still getting there when it comes to the software; the widespread ability for companies to really address the Big Data problem associated with this level of data collection.
Memoto is one such example of this technology (my only affiliation is that I am a fan who backed them on Kickstarter). Interestingly, and something that will be common to all of these tools, is their ability to turn a blind eye and forget. Turning a blind eye would be the technologies real-time decision that there is no current or future advantage to capture data at that point in time. Forgetting is discarding information after capture, whether it is immediately afterwards, during an archiving process or in the presentation layer when deciding what is useful or not to deliver to the end user.
How would it make you feel if your friend or family member did this?
It would make me feel as if my friend or family member were bat-shit crazy.
Proverbs 21:19
I like the idea of going to work every day in my suit and tie and every time a cop stops me for Driving While Black, Walking While Black, or Being Black in a Public Place, I can record every interaction and share my everyday experiences with the world.
The best part would be near the end, where you watch a video of yourself watching previous moments of your life; before long the camera would catch up to the present again and you'd watch a video of yourself watching a video of yourself, etc.
Is that better or worse then lose them all and remain married?
It depends whether you think of people as competitors and life as a sports game you have to win.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
you might keep reliving the bad experience over and over in a series of flashbacks. Until you remember your psychotic ex has your remote.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I don't want to relive my life in real time. I want to remember what I promised in the meeting last week, where I'm supposed to show up for lunch, and where I left my wallet this time.
And, I want to do it with one interface, without making an effort to take notes.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Every time I see an article on this kind of technology, I think about all the good old video games that hold a special place in my memories. I remember spending wee hours of the morning playing Ultima, Bard's Tale and other classics on the Apple ][e. Then I go back and load them now days and think "what a piece of crap compared to today's graphics and games." Can't help but think the same might be true of childhood memories. Some are probably best left to the fog of childhood interpretation. But I accept it's just a matter of time before this sort of technology will be commonplace.
This sounds awesome, and apparently unlike everyone else here, I would totally want to hang out with you while you were doing this. Would I act differently? Probably I would only be *more* motivated to be awesome. There's a wide variety of forehead-mounted video cameras you could choose from. Probably having a long-lasting storage device that you could carry on your person would be a harder problem.
Why not just live-stream your life to a server while choosing when to record it to keep some parts of your life as long-lasting memories? Doing so you'll avoid all the ugly stuff other people have pointed out while having an always ready personal recording device at your disposal.
Can't wait to see the video of you watching your video of you watching your video.
These started in the 1990s when cameras were bulking and flalsh was measured in megabytes. Even then the issue was "retreival": how do you find anything you recorded. They pretty much id clever things like only record when there was motion as not to keep hours of "dead time".
I suppose this could be a mode in Google Glasses. GPS and Voice will annotate and control.
My life is boring and repetitive.
So at least it would compress well.
I think I would rather not have my life recorded. There are moments that I'm glad fade with time, the death of a loved one, that first traumatic break up, the work screw up that cost you your job.
I kind of like the fact that in my memories I was not that awkward as a teen, that I was a better athlete and student. Call it repression, but I think Im better off.
The moments that I want to remember, graduation, getting married and those special vacations are all recorded enough for me.
Besides there are two downsides I can think of. The first is, what if your prom date doesn't want that backseat encounter taped and the second is imagine when meeting someone for the first time, they don't tell you about themselves over dinner, you have to sit an watch the last three years.
You want a record, keep a journal with photos or short videos - leave the documentaries to someone else.
First, let's look at it from the standpoint of just how much junk you are going to collect. Shoot, I can spend weeks or months going through and sorting through what I take on a single trip (depending on the length of the trip). I have learned that just because it may seem neat to walk down a street somewhere, you really do not want to go back and rewatch it later - from 30 minutes to an hour of stuff I used to shoot like that (I don't anymore), you may pull out a 5 or 10 second clip to use later in a highlight video. And do you really want a first-person perspective of you sitting for an hour a day reading slashdot?
Second, any camera that is going to be small enough to wear is going to have horrible quality. Won't work well in low lighting, will have issues with motion (unless you start going with a bigger camera, but then it is just going to get annoying wearing all the time).
Lastly, people just do not like to be around people who are ALWAYS taking pictures or videos. In fact, over the past year and a half, I had to pretty much retire my camera in an effort to restore some relationships. It is a pitty, as I have a nice camera. No, you are taking pictures or videos enough, people get to where they just don't want to be around you. I am warning you from experience - DON'T DO THIS!
Do what everyone else on the planet does - get a smartphone, that way you always have a camera available when you do want a picture or video of something, and post it to Facebook if you want to share it with friends and family.
FIRESIGN. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."