Lifelogging is the name of the activity that Bell is practicing. He is an extreme example of the form, the way Samuel Pepys was an extreme example of a diarist. Pepys's writing required attention in order to select from his experience the things he recorded. Lifelogging can be conducted with minimal engagement. You walk, and the camera around your neck takes photographs of things you may not even notice while you are occupied with whatever it is you are thinking about. If you feel your lifelog should include what you are thinking about, you can speak into a digital tape recorder, but Bell typically records only conversations. Occasionally, he feels encumbered by the project. "There's a number here," he says. "I'd like to say that I'm living ninety-five per cent of the time, keeping this system five per cent. I want to live a life, not be a slave to it. "Bell's son Brigham, a software engineer in Colorado, regards his father's project as self-involved to the point of being "egocentric." Gordon Bell considers himself something more like invisible in terms of the archive's intentions. "I'm not particularly interesting," he says. "I'm just typical of what you should be able to do."

But even though it would seem that Bell has his percentages backward, and devotes more of his life to the cataloging rather than to the living itself, his "extreme" seems strangely obvious, an almost unavoidable development, or result, of our digital capabilities. In other words, why shouldn't we keep a record of everything we've done, everything that's happened to us, every breath we take, every move we make? Bell himself, in that same profile, more or less says just that:

"Your aspirations go up with every new tool," he said. "You've got all this content there and you want to use it, but there's always this problem of wanting more"