Lifelogging: How will we forget in the future?
Humankind has put its faith into technology and the rate at which things are changing is mind boggling. If a person was to walk out of existence for five years and walk back, it'd be difficult for her to relate with the change. This wasn't necessarily the case a few decades ago. The rate of change is speeding up in terms of technology intrusion and the repercussions are huge. We surely know the wonders of technology and the problems it can solve but there have been many scary spin offs of the situation as well (chances of things going horribly wrong).Data has become omnipotent, or rather the one with the data has become omnipotent. Tracking incidents, collecting data, making analysis, trying to make sense of it all -- this cycle is being followed in every sector of life. Not barring the self. This very concept is termed as lifelogging.
The lines between data and the self is blurring. Lifeloggers are people who wear computers or devices to track their life. This picture depicts only the mobile apps that exist as of now and the things we can track on a personal level (more means of collecting personal data is in the SlideShow):
Tracking in the future will allow to keep a track of the minutest details in every sphere of life and this also leads to some significant questions about a transparent society, governance and living a 'sensored life':
What sort of surveillance society will we become?
Will sousveillance be a tool of democratization? (Sousveillance is most commonly defined as the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity)
What will happen to privacy? What about autonomy?
These are the very questions that the following report by Institute of Customer Experience (ICE), a non-profit by Human Factors International, asks. Human Factors International (HFI) is a large company with over 30 years of experience, specializing in user experience (UX) design. Ankush Samant, one of the authors of the report and a guest columnist for YourStory says, "This report goes a step ahead of just being informative and raises important questions such as, how lifelogging is changing our behaviors, habits and human selves." Here's the report:
Interesting follow up read:
