Over the weekend I heard part of a programme on the radio in which two employees of Microsoft Research in California were discussing what they described as “digitising your life”.
Apparently, this involves wearing some form of camera round your neck on a permanent basis which takes a photograph every 20 seconds and builds into a complete record of everything you do. Graham Bell and Jim Gemmill are conducting an experiment and have so far amassed over 300 gigabytes of material.
I could not help wondering why on earth anyone would want a complete record of what they had done! I also thought I would rather be responsible for processing 300 gb of electronic data for a law firm client than seeing what I had had for Sunday breakfast at 20 second intervals!
The part of the programme I heard did not give a clue as to the reason for the research other than to suggest it was to see if it could be done and what it might look like.
Scary, huh?!