Hacker Timesnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

That'll leave you with tons of text with respect to what you said. Now integrate that with some kind of a keylogger on all your devices (like a computer, tablet, and phone) which can track states and applications. Also, by virtue of having a current generation smart phone you can also tag locations and timestamps, at least to cell tower triangulation accuracy if not GPS accuracy.

All of this is possible now, and the lifelogging community has been doing it for years and years. "Why" you do it is still an unanswered question. The usefulness hasn't been proven out.

Over the past year, I've come to feel that perhaps recording every word isn't as important as recording the context. All the words you said are there, but the context is lost. In context, that was a really funny joke, but the words, by themselves, were rude, or cruel, or sexist, or racist. It doesn't record everyone around you laughing, or how good you felt, or that it was a really good day as far as your depression management was concerned, or that that was the last time you saw X before his accident, and when you do go back and reminisce, those are the important things, not the precise words you used.

As of yet, lifelogging hasn't saved the meaning.



I guess writing is still a poor form to record the whole spectrum of human emotions. Until we find a way to do that, context would necessarily have to be lost.

If only there was a way to make a person relive the same "memory" or "experience", like a Pensieve[1]

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensieve#Pensieve


Why stop there? Instead of saying "until we [someone else] find a way to do that," why not explore what that would take?

What does the research tell us about how we feel? How is that different across genders? Across personality types? Across cultures?

How can we represent that? What sort of accuracy matters? Should it be relative or absolute? Does it matter? What will we be using it for?

How can we record it? How much can we trust self-analysis, like diaries or mood questions? How much can we trust biometrics? Is that dependent per-person or can we generalize?

What sort of biometrics would we need? How long would we have to wear them? Where? Power? Fashion? What about on the beach, can they survive sand and salt water and 110 degree F weather? What about military use, can they survive high-pressure sand and persistent sweat and the very different bodily reactions that someone in a firefight goes through compared to a soccer mom?

What is the goal of an emotional recollection? To understand it yourself? To remind yourself? To reminisce? To convey your emotions to another? To allow another to find something similar in their own recorded memories so they can empathize better?

Don't stop at fiction or wait for someone else to make a web service for it. This is something that can be designed and built today. This is something that could have been designed and built a decade ago.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: