What's the deep need for recording everything that happens in our life? The promises of lifelogging.

I remember in the early 80's I was standing outside an ethnic restaurant in Milan with friends and we met a very young man, no older than ourselves. He told me that he had installed a tape recorder on his "500", a very small and cute Italian car. Any time he started the engine, the tape recorder automatically switched on so he could record conversations with his passengers and later listen to them.

His goal was to listen to himself talking later on. This guy was a nice and interesting character, and genuinely interested in knowing the different parts of himself, he wasn't a controlling paranoid personality. "One, No one and One Hundred Thousand" as Pirandello say. We are One for us, ultimately No one, but One Hundred Thousand for every different person we meet.

During the 80's some people in the alternative scene/culture were looking at the first video recording technologies as something that could bring more awareness in people's consciousness, as it were a Gurdjieffian continuous remembrance of ourselves. Now technology has evolved a lot more and Kevin Kelly writes about Lifelogging:

The goal of lifelogging: to record and archive all information in one’s life. This includes all text, all visual information, all audio, all media activity, as well as all biological data from sensors on one’s body. The information would be archived for the benefit of the lifelogger, and shared with others in various degrees as controlled by him/her.

Kevin Kelly is brilliant in forecasting the evolution of technology, but his analysis don't focus especially on the other half of the story: the impact of technologies on the soul. His classic book is Out of Control, that I published into Italian in the 90's.

First I ask myself what's the deep need for recording everything that happens in our life. Apart from the practical reasons to have such lifeloggings, I suspect it reflects on a different level a more spiritual, evolutionary need having to do with the desire to freeze certain life moments in order to be fully aware of them in our consciousness, in order to participate fully and deeply in the flow of life.

During the 80's some people in the alternative scene/culture were looking at the first video recording technologies as something that could bring more awareness in people's consciousness, as it were a Gurdjieffian continuous remembrance of ourselves. Now technology has evolved a lot more and Kevin Kelly writes about Lifelogging:

The goal of lifelogging: to record and archive all information in one’s life. This includes all text, all visual information, all audio, all media activity, as well as all biological data from sensors on one’s body. The information would be archived for the benefit of the lifelogger, and shared with others in various degrees as controlled by him/her.

Kevin Kelly is brilliant in forecasting the evolution of technology, but often his analysis don't consider the other half of the story: the impact of technologies on the soul. His classic book is Out of Control, that I published into Italian in the 90's.

First I ask myself what's the deep need for recording everything that happens in our life. Apart from the practical reasons to have such lifeloggings, I suspect it reflects on a different level a more spiritual, evolutionary need having to do with the desire to freeze certain life moments in order to be fully aware of them in our consciousness, in order to participate fully and deeply in the flow of life. Of course we can't freeze or record the multi dimensional "here and now" experience in any medium, but on the level of the mind we substitute the deeper spiritual needs with a neurotic attempt to record bits and bytes.

Most of the time the depth of reality just slips away from our awareness; our presence is total only when we have spiritual peak experiences or when we find ourselves in dangerous, life threatening situations. And when we are really fully present, our individual consciousness is not even separated from the event, our experience becomes immediate, un-mediated, becoming one with the surroundings. But when we can’t even be fully present in an experience when it is actually happening in the moment, how can we possibly be aware of it later through an external support?

Many technologies have been created in the past in order to grasp the essence of reality and of the human soul: portrait painting, photography, tape recorders, videos. All of them helped to a certain point in raising the collective consciousness and the capacity to know ourselves better, but all of those technologies are still unequalled by a very ancient and very low-technology technique: meditation, where we can have a direct inside view of ourselves and transform our souls through the catalyst of our consciousness. We don't need then to freeze the world with any medium since we can accept and flow with the endless dynamic transformation of reality.

The information processing society is a big step in the evolution of human beings but if it won't be combined with the silent consciousness processing capacities of our observing and witnessing soul, called meditiation, our soul will be stuck in an unending useless mental loop, looking for external tools that promise to overcome itself.

See also:

Biotech as an information system

Virtual worlds, mirror worlds, Second Life: backing up the messed planet

Mechanisms, mysticism and Amazon Mechanical Turk

Zen archery and computers

Lifelogging

The heart of the binary code

Downloading our life on Internet

Google, privacy and the need to be seen

Personal consumer