LifeLogging

This is nothing to do with games, but I'm just posting it here because I thought you might find it interesting.
Apologies for the spam if you're not.

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Scientific American are running an article about MyLifeBits, which is a project to record one's entire life, a process called "LifeLogging".

"GORDON BELL, one of the authors, launched a research project aimed at creating a digital archive of all his interactions with the world. Bell's digital memories include documents from his long career in the computer industry, all the photographs he takes and conversations he records, every Web site he visits, and every e-mail he sends and receives."

They also quote Vannevar Bush's Memex as inspiration for this project.

It sounds like a fascinating research project with curious by-products. For example, the SenseCam which automatically takes photographs whenever it detects a change in location or proximity to another person, and its application in helping retention amongst memory-impaired patients.

A discussion about this article over on Slashdot is mostly concerned with questions of security, about unlawful / unethical access to one's own personal, searchable, random-access life history.

There are also some interesting quotations from another site which remind me of Latour's concept of delegation in "Where are the missing masses? Sociology of a door",

"It gives you kind of a feeling of cleanliness," Bell tells me. "I can offload my memory. I feel much freer about remembering something now. I've got this machine, this slave, that does it."

And also of Marshall McLuhan's concept of sensory extension and the discourse on cyborgs,


"He has a superhuman brain: Does that change the nature of being human?"


The spectre of Foucault also crops up here in a maddening vision of absolute surveillance,


"What's more, knowing that everything is being logged might actually turn us into different people. We might be less flamboyant, less funny, less willing to say risky but potentially useful things, much as politicians on-camera tamp down their public statements into stifled happytalk. "There'd be a chilling effect," particularly early on, says Mark Federman, former strategist for the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, a high-tech think tank. "We'd all be on our best behavior. Reality would become reality TV."


I enjoyed reading this article with its witty and imaginative style,


"And even when his system is failing, Bell remains pretty bemused about everything, displaying the perpetual geniality of all brilliant, accomplished, wealthy older men who've long ceased to care what anyone thinks of them. Still, as I watch the hunt for the missing call, it feels like some creepy sci-fi version of Alzheimer's, or a scene plucked out of a bleak Philip K. Dick novel: Our antihero has an external brain with perfect recall, but it's locked up tight and he can't get in--a cyborg estranged from his own limbs."

Cyberpong

Following on from our discussions of the body and it's relationship to videogames, I refer you with an article from Wired nearly two years ago:

Matt Nagle is 26 years old, and is a C4 quadriplegic, and he can play Pong with his mind. You might also describe him as cybernetic, part biology, part technology.

Four months after the operation, I watched Caplan take Nagle through a typical training session. He tracked Nagle's mental activity on two large monitors, one of which displayed a graph of red and green spiking lines. Each spike represented the firing of clusters of neurons. As Nagle performed specific actions in his mind's eye - move arm left, move arm up - the electrodes picked up the patterns of nearby neuron groups. Then BrainGate amplified and recorded the corresponding electrical activity. Over dozens of trials the computer built a filter that associated specific neural patterns with certain movements. Later, when Nagle again mentally pictured the motions, the computer translated the signals to guide a cursor.