Life bits: boring today, relevant tomorrow

Oct 16, 2007

Life bits are coming. Long-time readers of Good Experience will know that I've railed on this topic for years now - almost five years, in fact - and a few months ago I included a small essay about life bits in my book Bit Literacy (Chapter 13, if you have it).

If you've missed the previous notices, here's the news: Pretty soon we'll be able to record every waking minute of our lives. It will change our work, our social life, our legal system, and it will be yet another challenge for those who never learned the skills of bit literacy.

For now, the trend is taking the shape of seemingly everything else online these days - yet another Web 2.0 startup - at Justin.tv. The technology is pertinent, but the business model, in my opinion, is not. Life bits are not TV, and no one wants to wants every minute of someone else's life.

But I could be wrong, and in this NYT piece, Silicon Valley luminary Stewart Alsop weighs in with a counter-argument:

The future, he hopes, will bring more and better choices. “If there are 6 billion people in the world,” he said, “imagine one million people broadcasting live, 999,000 of whom are boring — but the other 1,000 are really interesting.”

Either way, the hardware for life bits is on its way:

... Subsequently, the Justin.tv team was able to redesign its system so that a special camera is no longer needed. A tiny Webcam, easy to affix to a shoulder strap, hat or eyeglasses, can be connected to any lightweight Windows laptop with an Internet connection. A 3-pound laptop is still too heavy, however, to be carried everywhere one goes, day in, day out — assuming, of course, that the lifecasters have a destination other than their own home or office.

Still, watching life bits as a stream is boring. Thankfully for the NYT piece, there is one art celebrity with whom to wrap up the story:

... Andy Warhol, were he still with us, would enthusiastically embrace lifecasting, not because it enables everyone to become world-famous for 15 minutes, but because the medium is perfectly suited to Mr. Warhol’s taste.

“I like boring things,” he once wrote, and his experimental films deliberately tested his audience’s appetite for tedium. His 1963 classic, “Sleep,” was a black-and-white silent film that had a single actor, single scene and single plot point: the poet John Giorno sleeping — for 5 hours and 21 minutes. When it was shown for the first time in Los Angeles, an audience that was 500 strong began shrinking even before the 45-minute close-up of Mr. Giorno’s abdomen was complete. Still, 50 people lasted for the full 321 minutes.

See also:

• SF writer on life bits (May 14, 2007)

• Life bits via mobile devices (April 30, 2007)

• Life bits, tracking, and bit literacy (December 4, 2006)

• The Good Experience Review of Bits, 2002/2003 (January 10, 2003 (!))

• IN: Bit Literacy
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