Like most things ...

Michael Egan, in his ComputerWorld article on Bell writes:

I think we'll find that everybody really does want to do lifelogging. They just don't want more work, information overload or new data management problems.

And of course he's probably right. In its earliest, for fanatics only, iteration, life-logging demanded too much time (and equipment). It also demanded commitment. It ain't exactly life-logging if you're going to be doing it only on weekends.

With tools like the FitBit, and I guess the expectation that you could log only those things that really interested you, the "sport" became accessible to anyone with a bit of time and enough desire. But maybe that's precisely what's missing. Egan notes:

Either way, lifelogging is in a weird place right now. More data is being generated than ever before, but it's hard to bring it all together and hardly anybody wants to.

Remembering to forget

Another problem, which Bell didn't mention, is that the public appears to be suffering from data fatigue. It seems that the people working hard to forget things outnumber the people who are trying to remember things.

And all this seems to me to be a journalistic way of saying that it seems that nobody really cares.

Go to: The unbearable tedium of life-logging.