The SenseCam and the Art of Technology

Blogging is now officially old hat. In the near future we will be lifelogging, if Microsoft has anything to say about it. As it is currently practiced by Gordon Bell, yet another inventor of the Internet, lifelogging is walking around with a SenseCam hanging around your neck, snapping a photograph every minute or so. The SenseCam is a Microsoft product in development at the center of Bell's MyLifeBits project in which he records everything that he does, however mundane. The next challenge is figuring out what on earth one would do with 1500 photographs of their day. If you think blogging is a pointless activity, just wait until we start lifelogging.

In Alec Wilkinson's New Yorker profile Bell describes the concept behind lifelogging with a SenseCam. Bell sees himself as

building “a personal-transaction processing system.” The term is from the financial world. "Every transaction you have—a deposit, signing a check—those are all registered as a unique event," he says. "Capturing all the activity associated with a Web page, or e-mails, or your phone calls, or the SenseCam means that every event in life is being logged. It has a time stamp on it. This idea of being obsessive about things is a feeling we have that this is the way things are going to be."

Really? This is the way things are going to be? Is that good or bad?

The financial transaction metaphor is a telling one. A person wearing a SenseCam gives something to something else--to an archive, or more broadly, to the technology governing the archive. As it happens, "to give" is an important verb for Martin Heidegger. In German, es gibt (literally, "it gives") means "there is." The SenseCam wearer becomes a "standing reserve," not really a person acting freely but rather something existing in order to give data to an archive.  For Heidegger "standing reserve" is closely related to the idea of "instrumentality," by which he means turning everything into something that is no longer "good" in and of itself, but only "good for" getting something done. An airplane, for example, has no meaning or value in and of itself; it is merely a means of transportation.

In "The Question Concerning Technology," from which the idea of the standing reserve comes from, Heidegger considers how we relate to technology, or, really, how technology has come to shape how we look at the world. Heidegger isn't interested in the question of improving technology itself, for, as he puts it, "the essence of technology is by no means anything technological." Rather, technology is a way of looking at the world, what Heidegger called "enframing." Technology as it is generally applied tends to turn everything into a resource to be exploited--including people. (The people who work on the software development projects I run are called "resources.")  But Heidegger doesn't suggest that we should avoid technology; in fact, he says we can't. The SenseCam, by the same token, isn't automatically a horrible technology provided it frees us to do something we couldn't do before.

One of Bell's colleagues at Microsoft, Jim Gemmel, wants the SenseCam to enable what he calls "auto-storytelling." He explains, "My dream is I go on vacation and take my pictures and come home and tell the computer, 'Go blog it,' so that my mother can see it. I don't have to do anything; the story is there in the pattern of the images."  Auto-storytelling doesn't work, of course, but Gemmel is on to something. In Heideggerian terms, turning mere recording into a creative act revives the ancient Greek relationship between techne and poeisis, which means of bringing forth or revealing--ultimately "the realm of truth." Poeisis is also the root of poetry. We're trapped by technology when it's used merely to exploit and to more precisely classify the world. Technology can be freeing when it's more like an art form, which entails looking at the world as it really is.  The SenseCam can be free us if it shows us something in our world that we've never seen before, and if it allows us to create autobiographies that reveal who we really are, or at least a plausible version of who we are. In that case we would have the essence of technology--as an art form. Either that, or we'll have yet another junk drawer app.