I came across this post while looking for information on attention recording and one of the paragraphs regarding self-documentary really resonated with me.<\/p>\n
Greg Yardley writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n I’m also running the Attention Recorder because I’m afraid of forgetting. When I studied Russian history, some time ago, I was struck by just how little remained of people, only a few centuries after their deaths. Only scraps of documentation survive, if any; many individuals have simply ceased to exist. Provided I take care of the data, the Attention Recorder can serve as a record of me, allowing future generations to reconstruct how I thought and when I thought it. Perhaps I’ll be a good Master’s thesis a couple of centuries down the road. Or – more importantly – perhaps I’ll still be around in a couple of centuries. Ray Kurzweill raises the possibility in his The Singularity is Near, a book that’s been on my mind recently – and in case he’s right, and my lifespan is dramatically longer than my ancestors’, I want to make sure I remember who I am and where I came from in the centuries ahead. I wish I could record it all; what I see, what I hear, what I feel. I can’t, yet, although I’m confident I’ll be able to someday, and I’m hopeful I’ll be able to make use of those recorded surroundings some day after that. For now, my clickstream is a good start.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’m into this idea of recording my digital stream<\/em> as well. Practices of self-documentary and sousveillance<\/a> have been re-occuring themes in the arts and sciences. It’s just a matter of time before we have the tools to do this for ourselves in our digital lives.<\/p>\n In terms of current software, there are a few programs that map and track our activity within our computer OS, such as Slife<\/a> for the Mac. With the Internet, there’s basic archival and tracking methods available to us – browser history, site traffic patterns from users, software to track browser usage – but most web-based activity and attention recording is fairly limited. Or it’s not the kind we want, like those used by employers or the government for citizen surveillance. The Attention Recorder<\/a> mentioned above attempts to give individuals access to their web-base digital trail.<\/p>\n In general, though, our web-based and OS-based activities are disparate and exist in two separate worlds<\/strong>. What we need are tools that combine the two experiences to allow us to track, visualize, and understand our myriad digital activities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I came across this post while looking for information on attention recording and one of the paragraphs regarding self-documentary really resonated with me. Greg Yardley writes: I’m also running the Attention Recorder because I’m afraid of forgetting. When I studied Russian history, some time ago, I was struck by just how little remained of people,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[146,26,147,145,21],"class_list":["post-557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-attention","tag-digitallife","tag-slife","tag-souveillance","tag-trends"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}