“It has made me very smug” (Image: Hugh Kretschmert)
Read more: “Lifelogging: This is your life, on the record“
Gordon Bell, one of the first people to chronicle his existence digitally, explains how it has changed his life and the potential pitfalls
How did lifelogging take off?
The secret was to be interviewed by New ¾«¶«´«Ã½: your 2002 article about our project was so widely read by other journalists that coverage snowballed.
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What devices were you logging with at first?
The one device everybody has: the PC. All your email, your correspondence and documents – that side of your life is already in there. Then we got scanners. Then digital cameras. Then heart-rate monitoring armbands in 2002, GPS trackers in 2004 and wearable SenseCams in 2005. Data sources proliferated.
Everyone has a smartphone now. Have they changed the landscape?
Oh my god, yes. They have totally transformed it and made lifelogging almost implicit. They offer a very accurate log of where somebody is. Their broad array of sensors – compass, GPS, orientation, audio, video – and their massive memories can record so much that they are the personal mainframe you carry on your body. Their impact has not yet been fully felt – far from it.
Do you ever read your own lifelogs?
I don’t really go back and look at my life using them. It’s just an alternative “memory”, where I go to get facts about something if I need to.
Has lifelogging had any effect on your behaviour?
It has made me very smug. I have become a little bit of a librarian in my immediate family, able to sort out arguments about when somebody’s birthday is or when a bill came in, for example. The key thing is never to keep anything on paper. Paper is terrible as it’s unsearchable.
Is it a good idea not to record certain things?
For video to be truly useful, you need audio too – but sound recording can get you in deep trouble over privacy. And for things like washrooms you need to be able to disable video recording with a quick button press. SenseCams did not have that capability early on, but they do now.
Can others use our lifelogs for their own ends?
They are already doing that. Our online click streams are in effect activity logs, and a frightening amount of that is being used for advertising, to sell us things. I’d like to see that cut out. The loggers should benefit from logging, not sales companies.
What role can lifelogs play after the logger dies?
I wrote a conversational program, for a company called Cognea, that allows a chatbot to mine lifelogs. It lets you ask the chatbot the same questions you would have asked the person when still alive – like “where did you grow up?” By consulting their logs, it should be able to answer any question that they could have answered.
Technology can quickly become obsolete. Does that problem affect lifelogging too?
After 15 years I’m hitting a few such problems already – and if you’re trying to keep data for a century? All I can say is JPEG had better be there.
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Gordon Bell worked at Digital Equipment Corporation before joining Microsoft’s Silicon Valley telepresence lab in 1995. In 2002 he launched MyLifeBits, a project designed to digitally chronicle all aspects of our lives
This article appeared in print under the headline “Your digitised world”
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
