Remediated life: Like life, only better

Two different approaches to recording your entire life:

Gordon Bell (right) has gone digital with a system that he’s been using for the past nine years. Supposedly (or surprisingly) his methods require only 18 GB a year, or 1.1 TB for a 60 year stint. I guess he hasn’t bought a HD TV yet.

Robert Shields (left) records everything that happens in his life on a typewriter. By 1994 his diary had reached 35 million words; that’s somewhere between three and six thousand words per day.

Of course, log on to Facebook for the first time and you’ll be surprised by the level of detail with which other people have been logging your life. Something like 85% of American students are registered on Facebook – a social networking site centred around photos of you and your friends (hence the face) – that’s not a figure enjoyed in Britain, but you can be safe in the knowledge that if you know a handful of university people, at least one of them will have put a picture of you online and will have tagged it accordingly.

Is anyone going to go trawl through these digital lives? Probably not, but throw in some RSS feeds, Yahoo!s pipes and some facial recognition software (that’s the bit we’ll have to wait for) and your life will be just a browser’s click away.