For the upcoming Amsterdam conference, I’m working on a program idea that I want to invite your help with and ideas about. Questions about ubiquitous life-logging, photo-logging, are coming up a lot these days, and will likely become more common in the next year, with the advent of Memoto, Google Glass, and other devices.
I think it’s important to develop some reflective capacity in regard to these technologies. By this I mean some experience and vocabulary expressing how it feels to use them; what we learn we want/don’t want from them; how we can easily and understandably tell others to “knock it off” when we see that our photo is being logged; etc.
Our QS approach tends to be “learn by doing,” so my idea about how to advance this dialog is to see what happens when 3 or 4 conference attendees use a photo logging tool all day at the conference, and then stage an open discussion to explore what comes up. I’ve asked Memoto to supply the cameras, and they’ve agreed. Now I need people to join in. If you’d like to do this, comment in this thread and we can discuss it.
To be clear, I’m not looking for pure enthusiasts or evangelists. Our role is not to “sell” this technology to ourselves, but to use it thoughtfully and share our knowledge, so that we add reflective capacity - that is, some thoughtfulness - to the systems we and others are making. If you will be in Amsterdam and are willing to be a thinker about these new tools, you just have to have an open mind, a willingness to talk about what you learn, and an interest in helping others express themselves.
We’ll do this on the Saturday of the conference, and then have a kind of “Town Hall” at the end of the day to discuss what we’ve learned.
I’d really love to take part in this. Photo logging sounds very interesting, though it may feel quite invasive. Recently I had a discussion with one of my friends about ubiquitous, almost Orwellian screens and cameras. He remarked that lifelogging technologies could be easily used as a covert form of surveillance. He’s usually sceptical when it comes to all that self-tracking/lifelogging jazz, but I guess he has a point.
On the other hand, it’s equally easy to come up with creative ideas for gamifying photo logging or using it to enhance situational awareness and capture moments, which would be destroyed the second someone would ask for permission to log them.
As a person who has been doing this off and on for years, and, since August, taking a photo every minute of every day (you can see my presentation on this at the October PDX QS Meetup here: http://quantifiedself.com/2012/11/qs-pdx-recap-october-30-2012/), I’m super bummed to be missing this.
I’d love to be a part of this kind of discussion should it be ongoing, and will be looking forward to seeing what y’all end up exploring.
