A Personal Panopticon
April 1, 2003
One of the recurrent ideas that surfaces in science fiction and in the predictions of futurists is an always-on record of a person's life. Typically, it's presented as the stuff of a dystopian nightmare future, where the record is falsified and you end up in jail for a crime that your wayward clone committed. But what if such a record could be created and it were useful?
The technology is damn close to being practical. Simply carry slightly fewer MP3s on your iPod and you've got more than enough recording space for your entire day to be recorded in voice-quality mono audio.
Why would you want such a thing? That's always the first question that arises. My own desire for this device dates back to my late teens, when I used to make really bad music with my friends. My constant frustration was that I didn't have audio records of all the found-sound elements that I stumbled across in the course of a day. Snippets of conversation, ambient sounds, messages left on voice mail, obscenities shouted at me by strangers: these were all elements that I was determined to appropriate.
Later, as I realized the boundaries of my talents, (somewhere between a lump of coal and Ja Rule, which is to say, nonexistent) I started to realize that perhaps this audio record would be valuable on its own.
Having a complete audio record of my day, indexed by time, would allow me to refer back to a moment in conversation when quoting it later, or when I needed clarification on a specific point brought up while talking to someone. The timestamps alone, with perhaps quarter-hour index markers annotating a day's recording, would offer chronological indexing of the audio diary in a way that parallels permalinks in a weblog. Links to specific points in time turn out to be a very powerful way to manage microcontent.
The next level up would be an awareness of presence being linked into that audio stream. I suppose the super-futuristic version would be some FOAF-enabled scanning device that recognizes each of my friends' odors. It'd be worth it just for having alleviated that particular burden on my scarred olfactory memory.
More realistically, though, the immediate implementation could be made presence-aware by assigning stamps in your audio stream referencing the people invited to meetings on your calendar application, or by simply allowing you to pick people off of your contact list and associating them with the current point in the audio stream.
I've already recorded snippets of audio onto the PocketPC that plays my MP3s for me today, and that device carries a fully-synched, updated copy of my contacts on it. I've also recorded audio notes on my laptop using OneNote, and I could assign those notes to a contact's information in Outlook. But I'd much prefer an iPod-type device that I could just tap on while it was recording, scrolling to any given name in my address book and just clicking on it to select my companions at any given moment.
Now we've got an audio record that's searchable by time or by person. And it's aware of who those people are, and what level of trust that I've assigned to them either via relationships defined in FOAF or by using categories I've assigned in my contact management application.
This is where the audio record starts to get valuable. I can set my playback preferences so that this tagged audio is automatically available to the people who were marked as present at any given time. When those people access the audio stream, permission would be granted to listen to the dialogue without any significant barriers to their access.
From there, the software could identify simple, useful relationships in order to control access permissions for other people. An audio range tagged as taking place during a business meeting that's in my calendar would be accessible without passwords to anyone who's marked as a coworker of mine, but I'd receive a notification that they had done so when they clicked on the audio file. Move down one level of trust, and employees of the company I was meeting with would be able to access the audio, but only after submitting a request for me to authorize them. All the way down at the lowest trust level, complete strangers, the entire clip would be off limits to them, including obscuring of the fact that an audio record exists at all.
How do all these people get to this data, though? I'm not going to pass around my super-iPod to everybody I meet. Well, these individually-tagged clips of audio constitute some very valuable microcontent, and we've finally got a set of decently usable tools for publicly (or semi-publicly) publishing microcontent. Those tools are what we use right now to publish weblogs.
The necessary evolution is for personal publishing tools to start to allow far more granular control over permissions for reading the content that they generate. This doesn't just apply to the audio we've recorded with our always-on iPods, but to the text we're publishing to our weblogs as well. It should also encompass the new text that we'll feel comfortable adding to our weblogs once we know that we can control access to our sites with at least the level of control that LiveJournal users take for granted right now.
Weblog publishing tools will grow to allow us each to create a personal panopticon, at least to the degree that we're comfortable doing so. We've already seen that security through obscurity is untenable, and I've discussed how privacy through obscurity is going to be just as impossible to maintain in the future. So given that the key to maintaining privacy is going to be by choosing which parts of one's identity to expose, it's time that our personal publishing tools start to allow us to manage all of our information, using simple logic to determine which people are permitted to access which subsets of that data. Now that even Microsoft has embraced reasonable default settings in its software, it might even be possible that we won't see too many people accidentally making their darkest secrets world-readable through their weblog. We may still see the people who choose to do so on purpose.
Where does all this go, then? I'm hoping to eventually have a video camera with audio in roughly the form factor of today's Exilim. Another evolution will be the integration of personal publishing APIs into devices themselves. Instead of worrying about storage capacity on an audio or video recording device, manufacturers should be treating the memory cards in a camera or audio player as a local cache, emptying the cache to the central publishing repository for that user every time the device comes in range of a network connection, preferably a wireless one.
My PDA or tablet would let me take notes, and those notes would be upstreamed to my blog, marked as private by default, and then flushed from the immediate local storage as soon as it got full. A digital camera that performed those same functions would solve many of the issues with synchronizing and downloading individual pictures right now. There has been talk of individuals having data storage that lives "in the cloud" for years now, but the focus has historically been on security and implementation. The more important issue is that this storage cloud have an easy enough interface that publishing to it is almost invisible and nearly effortless. That simplicity of publishing is what blogs are all about, and the tools will allow new types of integration.
Today, we've already got bloggerazzi that appear at every gathering of web geeks. It seems that we've already accepted a future where we're all celebrities. If we're going to accept the negative implications of that reality, then we'd better get working on creating some positive implications to go along with it. The personal panopticon is one of the positives.
12:14 PM
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11 TrackBacks
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- Earlier: secrets of music promotion
- Next: VON Panels
All you need is speech to text conversion and video to ascii art conversion, and you are good to go...
how long have you been thinking about this? amazing entry!
This idea is interesting and you've laid out the practical uses just perfectly, but the problem from Samuel Pepys' famous diary to Kodak brownieboxes to weblogs and then to what you're proposing is a retardation the present, a sort of detachment from what is happening to you and what has happened to you.
While going through my own weblog just last night my memory was enhanced by remembering what had prompted me to write certain posts, but is there a point where all these records of our past take over our future--where we spend so much time going through our diaries, photographs, and audio-recordings that we lose some focus on the present?
It seems that such a future is a possibility, where there is so much esoteric content concerning ourselves and the world around us that we become unable to cope with what is actually happened. An example might be the diversification of the sciences, whereas an ancient Greek might have been able to know most of the body of work in all of science, now a genius is lucky to know half of anything in their sub-sub-sub-division of a field.
If there a point where this kind of esoteric information becomes esoterrorism, detaching us then drowning us in a river of too much information about ourselves? A true information-overload.
Anil! This is the best April fool's post I've seen yet! Congratulations, you definitely take the cake.
Oh what a sight it would be, people walking around with iPods dangling from their necks, handing out forms to everyone they meet, asking them 'Will you authorize me to record any conversation we might subsequently have?'.
Thus we see the culmination of one person's self-obsession and navel gazing cloaked in the guise of techno-babble. Nice try. Instead, just do like the ancient Romans, pay for an entourage of people to fawn over you and your self importance will be its own reward.
Not sure if this is an April Fool's joke, Anil, but I've had similar ideas. I would _love_ a personal area network with persistent audio and video recording. You could tap your leg to set a marker and later refer to saved A/V on either side. As a journalist, I think this would be extremely useful as a documentary tool, but for most people? Seems unnecessary.
In theory this sounds truly great. It would be great, if it weren't potentially illegal in many states.
Now IANAL, but not to long ago, I tried to do this and was slapped down by finding out that I live and work in a two party notification state. That means that before I can record you (outside of extemperaneous stuff) I need to get your permission to do it. There are a few ways I can do it. One of them may be simply making the recording device visible to all being involved where there's no question what the device is.
Then the problems are now that once someone knows they are bing recorded they aren't going to be as forthcoming as they might be. Also, once any one of parties being recorded asks you to stop, you have to stop.
Now if you're lucky enough to live in NY or a handful of other states, you're in a single party notification state. That generally means you can record whatever you want without having to notify the other parties in the conversation. If you've watched the Comedy Central show Crank Yankers I believe they only make calls from and to the small number of single party notification states.
Remember Linda Tripp of the Clinton/Monica era? She got in legal trouble not so much for making the recordings as that she was calling from a one party state into a two party state, and didn't notify the parties she was recording them. It became a federal offense.
I suppose if you wanted to make your device beep every 15 seconds or so, it would then be legal everywhere. But it'd also be annoying as heck.
I love most of Anil's ideas, but i don't want to live in the world that would result if this idea was actually realized. I mean, really- there is something beautiful and natural about the passing of time, forgetfulness, and the fact that the past is really past. I don't want every second of my day recorded- even though it might be useful to have the record as a reference. I mean, can you imagine the emotional and psychological burden of knowing that every detail is available and accessible all the time? Who could move on with life? I mean, even Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is only a few thousand pages. Who needs more than that?
However, the smaller-scale ideas in this post are great- the local caching and automatic remote storage of information on portable devices is a must as we move forward. This should be foremost in the mind of any designer working on stuff like that today.
I suggested the idea of a constant audiovisual record of one's life to a friend recently - she gave me the most withering look, and said, 'Some of us have that technology. It's called a memory.' (I can't believe I've seriously wished for someone else's idea of an April Fool)
Microsoft has been working on MyLifeBits for a while now. It's a cool idea until you think about George W. and the government using it against you. With semantic analysis they could profile you and put you in jail for pre-crimes.
I think it's a fantastic idea, and one which it is almost time for. It is a frightening thought that one day everything that we say and do will be recorded, but I may be alright with that as long as whatever politicians, lawyers and government officials say and do is available to the public. Might cause a rash of honesty.
Revisit Andy Warhol as he was fascinated with similar ideas of found sound and preservation of one's day. He loved the invention of the portable cassette recorder and left hundreds of unarchived tapes for historians.
Key to actualizing these excellent concepts: "How do all these people get to this data, though?" I agree, it's one matter to record, another matter to communicate and transmit what has been recorded!
The idea of persistent recording/playback technologies is both intriguing and scary. I wrote about the Personal Awareness Assistant from Accenture Technology Labs last month - it incorporates some of the picture taking/time-stamping capabilities you mention. The bottom line is that if somebody used this device (I uploaded picture with my post), I would probably stop talking and walk-away.
The episode of Scientific American Frontiers that aired last night in my market touched on this subject by profiling the cyborgs in the MIT Media Lab. (If it hasn't aired yet for you or it's about to rerun, it's a *great* episode of a great series.) I like the idea of an archive of the things I've promised to do or the incredibly not funny jokes I've said; on the other hand, I hate the idea of a permanently transparent society. On the gripping hand, I think society will create rules of etiquette like we're trying to create rules of etiquette about pagers or cell phones, delineating when all this technology will be on and when they'll need to be off.
Interesting times, for sure.
believe it or not, but the field of Information Retrieval was started by this idea. Vannevar Bush wrote a paper in 1945 detailing his hopes that in the future we would have a device that recorded everything we said, did, wrote, etc. (Read about it at http://lesk.com/mlesk/ages/ages.html).
My question about this was: If I have my whole life recorded, how do I find the time to go back and watch it all?
If the cycle of learning is to plan-do-check-act time and time again, as W. Edwards Deming proposed, then imagine how much we will be able to learn from watching the rerun of ourselves watching the rerun of ourselves watching the rerun of ourselves watching the rerun of ourselves watching the rerun of ourselves watching the rerun...
As a daddy who always misses the best snapshots of his offspring, I've wished for unobtrusive eyeglass-mounted cameras for a long time.
While y'all work on the technology, though, I refer you to How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think, a guide to a paper-based cognitive panopticon guaranteed by its author to freeze your brain in its tracks.