CHAPTER 6

Technologies to Save Our Information

There is a story of a young man—a promising playwright—who decided to part with all of his worldly possessions and to walk across America as a “pilgrim for peace.”³⁴ He divested of the digital as well as the physical: He gave away his computer after first wiping the hard drive clean of all data, including all the plays he had written over an eight-year period.

What to do later, when he decided to abandon his pilgrimage and reconstruct the pieces of his former life? How to recover eight years’ worth of plays?

The answer: Email.

I don’t know how exactly he got back copies of his plays. The plays in one version or another had been sent to other people—friends, colleagues, prospective producers, etc. He may very well have sent drafts to himself as insurance against the failure of local storage. Perhaps recovery was as easy as the reactivation of his Gmail or Hotmail account and an inspection of sent mail. Or, perhaps he had to ask the indulgence of the people to whom versions of the plays were sent (“Er . . . remember that play draft I sent you? . . .”).

That his digital trail was not so easily erased was a good thing. This is a story with a happy ending. We can be sure that such stories end less happily in other instances: digital trails may persist like a bad memory notwithstanding all our efforts to delete them.

6.1   THE POSSIBILITY OF “TOTAL CAPTURE”

The story tells us that digital capture—automated and passive—is here already. Capture is a by-product of our activities. How can we use this information to advantage toward the “goals and roles” in our lives? How can we avoid being “framed” by digital information (e.g., pictures, videos, emails, and tweets) which may, taken out of context, portray us falsely?

We might strive toward a “total capture” of all our daily experiences. Imagine, for example, a camera worn as jewelry or apparel to record everything we see and hear during the day. The recording is our alibi, our record, our memory that stays even as our internal memory fades with the passage of time.

Dreams of saving it all (aka “lifelogging” or “total capture”) can be traced back to Vannevar Bush and his sketch of a Memex system.³⁵ Memex was described in terms of conventional cameras and microfiche. More recently, we have systems of digital capture and preservation. The Lifestreams effort explored the potential to organize all personal digital information along a timeline.³⁶ MyLife-Bits explored the feasibility of storing all of a person’s digital information, including digitized copies of paper information, into a single database, organized for rapid searching and the dynamic construction of collections (groupings) of information on demand.³⁷

Mann conceived of “wearable computing” as a way of capturing the interactions people have with their surroundings. Eyetap devices might record continuous video.³⁸ SenseCam, a device that periodically and automatically records still images, has been extensively tested by volunteers, who wear a rather largish pendant around the neck.³⁹ More recently, there is even a start-up proposing to commercialize the SenseCam approach.⁴⁰

Figure 6.1: Images of the SenseCam v2.3 prototype. Used with permission from Hodges et al., 2006.

Gordon Bell estimated in 2001⁴¹ that a lifetime video (DVD quality) record of a person’s experiences might be recorded in a petabyte (a million gigabytes) of data and that associated costs of storage might, two decades hence (i.e., 2021), be as little as $100 per year.

Bell’s projections may even have been conservative. Advances in the technology of storage promise more storage lasting over longer periods of time, for less money and less energy.⁴² From 1986 through 2007, the world’s per capita capacity for information storage has doubled roughly every 40 months.⁴³

With the use of social media we can anticipate an ability to reconstruct a digital record of events from multiple perspectives. We are already beginning to see, for example, web queries that can retrieve “pictures and clips” within a given range of time and location.⁴⁴ Furthermore, recordings might be interleaved with an item event or, i.e., log.⁴⁵ The log provides a searchable index into the video stream; the video, in turn, provides an indication for our immediate environment at the time we were sending an email, tweeting, texting, surfing the Web, etc.

Recordings and the log might be further enhanced through the use of telematics⁴⁶ to record data concerning the automobiles we drive. We might also track the ebb and flow of energy use in our homes and correlate with our activities.

We’re never done. For everything recorded, there is always something left unrecorded. What about smells? Tastes? Feelings? What about a back-mounted camera to record, literally, what’s happening behind our backs? And if we take care of these, there is still always a larger context, the ground to our figure, that goes unrecorded.

If “total capture” is impossible by strict definition, lifelogging by relaxed definition is already here. We have fragmented logs in the form of time-stamped emails, text messages, tweets, “Instagrams,” etc. We can imagine a future in which our lifelogs are an integration of these and other sources of time-stamped event information. Events might point to pictures and video clips. Events might include measures of heartbeat, blood pressure, glucose levels, and so on. Logging can happen not only during our waking hours but also as we sleep.⁴⁷

So, given a lifelog in some form or another, what good is it? How would we use it?

6.2   PERSONAL POTENTIALS OF A LIFELOG.

Sellen and Whittaker⁴⁸ describe “the five Rs” of benefits that might accrue “if we could digitally capture everything we do and see.” With capture we might better:

• recollect so that we could recall, for example, the name of the person we talked to at a party last night or the instructions we received from our supervisor during a drop-in meeting.

• reminisce (as a special case of recollecting) in order to re-live past experiences (especially the good ones).

• retrieve specific items of digital information such as an email, document, or web page.

• reflect upon past events including our interactions with other people. Could we have been more understanding? Less argumentative? In correlating our activities with physical measures, we might reflect upon situations that tend to make our heart rate or blood pressure go up (or down). At what times of the day are we at our best for completing tough tasks or making difficult decisions? Does the second cup of coffee make us more or less productive? Are we getting good sleep at night? Does it matter what we ate for dinner? When?

• remember our intentions. Did we remember to pick up the milk?

A recall benefit was observed in one study involving the use of a SenseCam for a 12-month period by a patient with amnesia. “The results of this initial evaluation are extremely promising; periodic review of images of events recorded by SenseCam results in significant recall of those events by the patient, which was previously impossible.”⁴⁹

A benefit for reminiscing is reported in the description of another study by Lindley and colleagues where members of a household each wore a SenseCam during the same week. Household members then shared their SenseCam images with each other. “The time-lapse nature of the image stream led participants to romanticize the mundane and find sentimentality in unexpected places, and was particularly effective at portraying personality and play.”⁵⁰

Lindley and colleagues also report a benefit for another “R” in a study involving the use of SenseCams by members of four separate households. Images viewed some 18 months after their capture appeared to be especially effective in support of reflection: “The findings reveal how images captured by different family members led to new insights around normally unremarkable routines, and provided new perspectives on how children experienced the world, while the 18-month interval prompted some reinterpretation of the past and made participants aware of incremental changes in their everyday lives.”⁵¹

More generally, as we combine recordings of “the same” event via devices worn by different participants, an objectification of multiple viewpoints—possibly quite divergent—becomes possible.⁵² Mann speaks of sous-veillance (from the French for “to watch from below”) as a counterpoint to a more “God’s eye” surveillance provided by cameras placed in fixed locations that often “watch from above.”⁵³

6.3   CAVEATS AND DISCLAIMERS

Notwithstanding these potential benefits of digital capture and an approach of “saving everything,”⁵⁴ an accounting of actual benefits is more nuanced. Sellen and Whittaker go on to review⁵⁵ studies that suggest the following:

• Digital information such as pictures and SenseCam images can help us recall a particular event. “Oh, that’s right. Mike was there and told that interesting story about the election.”

• Images that are passively and automatically captured may be more effective in supporting our recall of an event than, for example, pictures we consciously take with a camera.⁵⁶

• At the same time, our ability to recall declines with the passage of time with or without the “prosthetic” of SenseCam images. Apparently, as our memories fade with the passage of time, the effectiveness of images in evoking these memories also declines.

In another article, Sellen and colleagues note “. . . in the case of remembered events, we failed to find an interaction with the length of the test interval. In other words, there was no evidence that SenseCam images provided any greater (or lesser) benefit over time, . . . with SenseCam images, we can remember more, but the power of these cues to spark remembering also deteriorates over time.”⁵⁷

In relation to recall (and reminiscing) a distinction is made between the function of external memory as a record of “what must have happened” as opposed to a cue for internal memories. In the complete absence of a recalled internal memory of an event, we can often piece together an understanding of what “must have” happened. A picture of a younger us in a graduation gown with the main building for our high school in the background “must have been” taken at our high school commencement. (And, yes, we’d forgotten how pimply-faced and thin we looked back then.)

The time intervals studied so far have been relatively short—up to four months. What is the value of information like pictures, video, sound, text, email, and tweets over much longer periods of time? Will that external information do more, over time, to compensate for the decay of internal memory? And, on a darker side, is it possible that doctored records might lead us to construct a false memory for an event that never happened?⁵⁸ These are good questions for which we do not yet have an answer.

As another practical limitation of total capture, we can note that, even as the capacity to capture and store continues to increase, the time we have to retrieve and review is fixed. Studies suggest that information recorded digitally is rarely accessed again⁵⁹ or as in the case of digital photographs, only a tiny portion is ever accessed again.⁶⁰

Time considerations support another observation on the practical limits of lifelogs: People often settle for imperfect, internal memories quickly in preference to a more time-consuming retrieval of external information, which might represent a particular event more completely.⁶¹

“Total capture” might also lure us into a false sense of security. We don’t pay attention in a lecture or meeting thinking “I can always look at the recording later” but we may have trouble doing so and, by not being actively engaged during the event, we miss an opportunity to interact and ask questions to better understand the material. Lansdale⁶² expressed this as a dilemma—“the more we automate the process of storage and take responsibility away from the user, the less he is going to remember, and therefore the less he is going to be able to retrieve.” And then, since lessons build the new on the previous, so too do the negative effects of inattentiveness.

The importance of active, meaningful engagement as a means to understand and form durable memories for the material (e.g., of a meeting or lecture) is well-established from basic research in cognitive psychology.⁶³ Studies of note-taking⁶⁴ indicate that we’re more likely to remember the more important points from a lecture if we take notes, even if we never consult the notes again.⁶⁵ As we take notes, we paraphrase, expressing the content again in our own words. In so doing we process the information we are receiving more “deeply,” forming new associations to the material within our internal memories.

With respect to activities of keeping, a contrast can be made between activities that promote a richer engagement with the information and activities that distract from the information being presented. Simple note-taking focused on understanding and recording the main ideas may improve the quality of our engagement with the information. On the other hand, a more mechanical attempt to record the lecturer word-for-word may distract us from engaging the information more deeply. In a best of both worlds, the “gist notes” we take might be interleaved in time with a recording of the presentation. Notes then serve as a kind of index into a selective review of the recording.⁶⁶

Our attention, like our time, remains a precious resource in short supply even as ease, economics, and capacity for information capture and storage continue to improve.

It is generally a good thing that we no longer need to agonize over what to keep and what to delete—why bother when storage is so cheap?⁶⁷ However, although we may not need to delete, we are well advised to remove old items from our attentional surfaces.⁶⁸

One important surface that gets our attention, our email inbox, does this for us. As new emails arrive, old emails are pushed down and out of sight. This also happens in our digital calendars. If we view a week at a glance, then our view of the current week displaces the view of the previous week.

For other surfaces, such as a frequently used folder or a to-do list, moving older items out of the way (e.g., into a subfolder) requires our conscious time and attention. Future applications might more routinely include a “shelf-life” logic so that items are archived or sorted to the bottom if we haven’t worked with these items in some time.⁶⁹

6.4   THE PIM TRANSFORMED, THE PIM THAT REMAINS

As we consider technologies for saving our information, remember that a given item of information might be personal—might be “ours”—in any or several of the senses determined by its relationship to us. The senses in which information can be personal were illustrated in Figure 1 of Chapter 2 (Part 1, “The Basics of PIM”) and this diagram is repeated again here (Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2: Six senses of personal information combine to make a personal space of information (PSI), Based on an illustration by Elizabeth Boling.

Information can be personal in relation to you or me because it is: P1. Owned by us (and at least partially under our control). P2. About us. P3. Directed toward us by others. P4. Sent or shared by us. P5. Experienced by us. P6. Relevant to us.

We note again that these senses are not mutually exclusive. Far from it. An item of personal information is frequently personal in several of these senses. In aggregate the six senses combined exclude very little, especially when P6 is added. These senses are useful for the complementary perspectives they provide on our information. The six senses will be used as a yardstick by which to assess each of the technologies we review in this book.

For any piece of information or for any tool that would manage this information, it is illuminating to cycle through each sense of the personal and ask, “In what way(s) is this personal?”

We began this chapter with notions of “total capture.” By an information processing approach to intelligent behavior⁷⁰ all of our experiences of the world are informational, that is, products of our processing the worldly data that impinges upon our senses. This includes information packaged into items such as email messages, paper documents, and web pages. But more generally, anything we experience is information and potentially subject to capture and storage in some form.

This is the P5 sense of information: what we experience. We can attempt to “capture,” with varying degrees of fidelity, the information of the original experience. This produces new information in some format that represents the original experience. The new information might, for example, be a video clip stored in an MPEG format, a verbal description written in plain text, a digital photograph stored as a JPEG or TIFF file, or even a pen drawing on paper.⁷¹

To the extent that we have control over this representation, the information becomes P1, that is, “owned” by us. As soon we share the information, it becomes P4. To the people we share it with—our Facebook friends, for example—the information is P3 (information directed to them). As it gets shared, the photo, clip, or text message representing an experience we had becomes from our perspective an important subset of P2—information about us but under the control of someone else.

We can also consider the impact that technologies for capturing and saving will have upon our six activities of PIM. Recall again from Chapter 2 of Part 1 that the six activities of PIM are keeping, finding (re-finding), maintaining and organizing, managing privacy and the flow of information, measuring and evaluating (of our practices of PIM) and making sense of and using information.

The discussion about finding (and re-finding) information will wait until the next chapter, which deals with search. Keeping activities may be altered by saving technologies but perhaps not as much as we might initially have thought. Yes, the recording we make during a lecture might free us from scribbling down a word for word transcription. But if we elect instead to catch up on email or complete some form-filling busywork, we should be doing so because the lecture is information we know already or know we don’t need. Unless some other task needs immediate attention, we should not attend to these tasks merely so that we can later attend to the recording of the meeting. Where, after all, is the savings in this?

We may, in fact, take notes even though a faithful video recording will be available for the meeting. Notes might be time-stamped and then synched with the recording so that the notes serve as an index of the recording and provide useful entry points into the stream.

Or we may take notes not as a thing to be used later but rather as a means of more fully comprehending the lecture. Paraphrasing the lecturer’s ideas helps focus our attention. We’re recording to internal “wet” memory. As we paraphrase through notes, we’re more likely to be aware of gaps in our understanding and points of disagreement. The notes may be illegible. We may never consult them again. Even so, they have served their purpose.

What about other kinds of keeping such as taking a picture or video? In the introduction to this chapter, I suggested that we might happily forgo picture-taking if the process could somehow be delegated to our friends, a professional photographer, or a device like the SenseCam. But here, too, some of us might consider the taking of a picture of, say, a beautiful sunset not as a distraction from the current experience but a way of more fully attending to the scene.

As for our keeping activities, so too for meta-level activities of PIM: Saving technologies do not save us from the need to manage:

Maintenance and organization. Saving technologies mean there is even more of our information (especially P1) to maintain and organize. Digital photographs are a case in point. Their capture is easy. We can store gigabytes of photos on our palmtop devices. Photos can be uploaded automatically to a laptop computer or to the Web. But then what? Is this information safely backed up to guard against crashing hard drives or the theft of our devices? Is this information organized for use later on? Or consider our methods of document versioning. Many of us still save versions of a document in separate files even if only a few words are different between versions. Wasteful in storage but who cares? Storage is cheap. But we may care a lot later if, lacking a system for organizing versions, we accidentally edit and distribute the wrong version.

Managing privacy and the flow of information. With technologies of web-based information saving and sharing, the senses of our personal information can be likened to blotches of paint in a watercolor. Information experienced by us (P5) runs into information we own (P1) and then into information we project (P4) via sharing on the Web. Cheap and easy storage means that others also keep huge amounts of information about us (P2). Our connections to the Internet greatly increase the opportunity for others to send information our way (P3).

Technologies that enable us (and everyone else) to save information make it even more imperative to manage not only privacy but also “publicy”—how do we appear to others.⁷² We may have reason, for example, to maintain a lifelog not as something we’ll necessarily ever have time to consult, but as a “for the record” alibi. As our lives and ourselves are increasingly mediated by the Web, we also need to address issues of search engine optimization (SEO)⁷³ in our projections of ourselves onto the Web. And we need to understand and be able to trust the privacy controls provided through web services for sharing and syncing.⁷⁴

Measuring and evaluating. Given an ability to record our interactions not only with digital information but also with the physical world, opportunities for measuring and evaluating greatly increase. We measure to evaluate our practice of PIM and our lives more generally. The “quantified self” movement loosely groups various efforts to understand ourselves better and to make life improvements based upon logged data.⁷⁵ Are we making the best use of our time, energy, and money? Are we eating well (but not too well)? Are we getting enough exercise? Enough sleep? Saving technologies will provide us with increasing options to measure and, through measurements, to evaluate. To the good, we may learn and so make changes toward a better life in which we are better people. To the bad, we risk becoming inwardly focused and obsessed with our measurements so that there is little time left to live. “Know thyself” is a Delphic maxim. But so too is “nothing in excess.”⁷⁶

Making sense of and using our information. Saving technologies will make it much easier for us to save (pile, group) information for review later on. This might be information for a trip we’re planning, a decision we need to make, or a project we need to complete at work. When we find the time to review this information, we face a more general problem of evaluation. What is the information telling us? How to make sense of it all? And do we need more? Do we have enough to make a decision? In organizational contexts, we hear discussion of data mining and “big data.”⁷⁷ How to make sense of very large sets of data? Where are the hidden “gems” of understanding and actionable implication? As in so many other areas, as information resources move from the organizational to the personal, so too do issues of information management. Recently then, the phrase “small data” (or “little data”) has been coined.⁷⁸ The expression nicely riffs on the “big data” theme to provide a PIM emphasis. Whether the “little data” movement produces more than a new perspective remains to be seen.

Our information . . . sort of. And then there is information about us that is “ours” and protected but not fully under our control. In this category are monthly statements from our bank, credit card, and brokerage accounts. We used to get these as paper documents via surface mail. We now increasingly opt for paper-free, on-demand transmission. Statements can be downloaded as PDFs, but do we always remember to look?

Often more useful are the dynamically generated listings of account activity that we get through interactions with a database. Working through a financial institution’s database, we can receive a customized listing of transactions that we can then elect to download (e.g., as comma-separated values or “CSV”) for import into a spreadsheet. The data in this form is generally more useful than that in PDFs. We can, for example, do subtotals to find out where the money goes.

But a problem arises. Institutions may keep data for only a limited period in databases to which customers have ready access. Institutions may even keep PDFs of monthly account statements in a readily accessible location for only a few years. And what happens if you switch banks or your credit card number is compromised and needs to be changed?

We can make copies of all our monthly PDF statements. We can update our spreadsheets periodically with database listings. But will we? We have to remember to do this. Copies of our electronic statements do not stack up in the manner of paper copies delivered via surface mail. Usually, this is a good thing. But what if we really need this information some day? Making copies and doing updates takes time. More likely, we won’t. As time goes on the information is available only in less useable form, such as PDFs, and may eventually only be accessed via special request.

It may be time, therefore, to think about another more practical kind of “total capture.” Forget about a total capture of all that we see and hear. What about total capture of all that we spend and earn via a special kind of “crawl?”⁷⁹

An increasing reliance on digital information brings up other new issues of maintenance. How long does a given medium of digital storage last? And what happens if “the lights go out” for a prolonged period of time or, cataclysmically, forever?⁸⁰ If our lights and electricity are really out, we obviously have bigger problems to contend with, but those of us who survive these problems might be very happy for non-digital backups to our digital information.⁸¹

With lights and electricity still on we must deal with the reality that media for digital storage are not forever; each has a limited lifetime. For information kept on the Web in readily accessible form, we can continue to copy the information from place to place and into newer formats so that it stays “fresh.” But information kept readily accessible on the Web consumes enormous amounts of energy.⁸² Why spend all that energy when the likelihood we’ll ever need the information again is extremely small? One interesting alternative for archival is storage based upon artificially constructed DNA where the bases of DNA—adenosine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G)—are used to encode information.⁸³ Encoding is currently costly but, once encoded, the information might persist for thousands of years.

In summary, with one technology area—for saving our information—considered, the need for PIM is still firmly intact. But what if we could summon the information we need when and where we need it? Would we still need PIM? We’re on to a consideration of search.

³⁴ The story comes to me via a local KUOW radio broadcast of the Jan. 4, 2013 episode of “This American Life” (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/483/self-improvement-kick).

³⁵ Bush, 1945.

³⁶ Fertig, Freeman, & Gelernter, 1996a; Freeman & Gelernter, 1996.

³⁷ Gemmell, Bell, & Lueder, 2006; Gemmell, Bell, Lueder, Drucker, & Wong, 2002; Gemmell, Lueder, & Bell, 2003.

³⁸ Mann, Sehgal, & Fung, 2004.

³⁹ Byrne et al., 2008; Hodges et al., 2006; Siân E. Lindley, Harper, Randall, Glancy, & Smyth, 2009; Sellen et al., 2007.

⁴⁰ Ref http://memoto.com/.

⁴¹ G. Bell, 2001.

⁴² Read, for example, about recent developments in Phase Change Memory (PCM) and Resistive Switching Random Access Memory (RRAM); see (Wong et al., 2011) Farther out is the potential of DNA storage (Goldman et al., 2013). An article in the Economist describes the many potential advantages of PCM over flash memory including speed, capacity for much greater miniaturization, with much greater density of storage, and also characteristics of dynamic random-access memory with the potential to serve as “storage-class memory” (Economist, from the print edition: Technology Quarterly).Q3, 2012.

⁴³ Hilbert & López, 2011.

⁴⁴ See, for example, “Geofeedia helps journalists locate real-time photos, tweets where news breaks,” “Simple Tool Lets You Dig Up Instagram Photos by Time and Location” and “neartime: find flickr photos taken nearby in time and space” each returned with a Google search for “search for photos by time & location.”

⁴⁵ W. Jones, 2007; William Jones, 2012, Chapter 3 (Part 1).

⁴⁶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telematics.

⁴⁷ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/24/sleep-tracking-devices/2007085/.

⁴⁸ Sellen & Whittaker, 2010, p. 70.

⁴⁹ Hodges et al., 2006, p. 177, see also Kalnikaite & Whittaker, 2012.

⁵⁰ Siân E. Lindley et al., 2009. See also, Harper et al., 2007.

⁵¹ Siín E. Lindley, Glancy, Harper, Randall, & Smyth, 2011. See also, Isaacs et al., 2013.

⁵² We are reminded of the story and film, Rashomon wherein different characters provide distinctly different versions of the same incident. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon.

⁵³ Mann, 2004.

⁵⁴ See also Chapter 7, W. Jones & Teevan, 2007.

⁵⁵ Hodges et al., 2006; Sellen et al., 2007.

⁵⁶ Why would pictures automatically taken be better than pictures actively taken in the support of recall? One explanation may be that, if we are taking a picture, our attention is already focused on the event, thus strengthening our memories for the event whether or not we view the picture later. On the other hand, pictures taken automatically may remind of events we were less fully attentive to at the time of their occurrence.

⁵⁷ . . .”page 88, “Sellen et al., 2007.

⁵⁸ Loftus, 1993.

⁵⁹ Petrelli & Whittaker, 2010.

⁶⁰ Steve Whittaker et al., 2010.

⁶¹ Gray & Fu, 2001, Kalnikaité & Whittaker, 2007.

⁶² Lansdale, 1988, p. 65.

⁶³ Original “levels of processing” work by Craik and Lockhart, 1972. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levels-of-processing_effect, demonstrated superior memory for words processed more “deeply” for meaning rather than for superficial features such as appearance and sound. A related “generation effect” (Slamecka & Graf, 1978) points more generally to a benefit for paraphrases generated by recipients in their own words. A technique follows that many of us, when giving instructions to others (especially to our own children) have learned apply: Ask the recipient to repeat the instructions in his/her own words.

⁶⁴ For an extensive review of note-taking studies, see Williams & Eggert, 2002.

⁶⁵ See also, Kalnikaite & Whittaker, 2008; Williams & Worth, 2002.

⁶⁶ See, for example, Kalnikaite & Whittaker, 2012.

⁶⁷ Bergman et al., 2009, note a “deletion paradox” that when storage space is dear and needs to be managed we may find ourselves spending time on the wrong kind of information—information that is old and slated for deletion but that we agonize over nonetheless “to be sure.” W. Jones, 2007, describes a related “old magazine effect” that, when attending to an item for deletion (such as an old magazine), we’re likely to notice all sorts of potential uses (e.g., interesting articles we’d like to read some day).

⁶⁸ W. Jones, 2007.

⁶⁹ But perhaps we should hold our collective breath. Malone had a similar proposal back in 1983 (Malone, 1983).

⁷⁰ An information processing approach to human psychology was pioneered by Broadbent, 1958. See also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadbent’s_filter_model_of_attention.

⁷¹ Don Norman describes his experience during a journey to the Yellow Mountain (Huang Shan) in China. Many tourists simply took pictures with their cameras. However, a group of artists chose sketching and painting as a means of recording their experiences (http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/chapter_1_i_go_to_a.html).

⁷² Marchionini coins the term “proflection” to describe the interplay between projections of a person’s information into cyberspace and the reflections that others (people and machines) create to those projections (Gary Marchionini, 2008).

⁷³ On the topic of “personal SEO” see, for example, http://socialwebthing.com/2010/03/10-tips-to-boost-your-personal-seo/, http://blog.kissmetrics.com/personal-branding-seo/, and http://www.slideshare.net/bencotton/presentation-to-london-met-on-personal-seo, and http://www.slideshare.net/RossHudgens/how-to-get-hired-in-seo?from_search=6.

⁷⁴ For example, a search on “privacy in facebook photos” in June of 2013 produced several interesting articles including, http://allfacebook.com/people-arent-stealing-your-facebook-photos-a-lesson-in-privacy_b117857. A search using the template “How secure is . . .” applied first to Facebook and then Dropbox in each case produced the standard reassuring articles form the websites for these services but then other articles from independents such as: http://www.pcworld.com/article/249727/how_secure_
is_my_facebook_information_.html, https://nolancaudill.com/2013/04/14/how-secure-is-dropbox/.

⁷⁵ Search “self-tracking,” “the quantified self,” and “personal informatics” to locate websites such as http://quantifiedself.com/guide/ and http://personalinformatics.org/ and short articles such as Hollindale, 2013; Singer, 2011, or the Wikipedia article on “Quantified Self” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_Self). For more scholarly articles use search expressions within Google Scholar or the ACM Digital Library (http://dl.acm.org/).

⁷⁶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_of_Delphi#Oracle.

⁷⁷ See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data.

⁷⁸ See, for example, http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/little_data_makes_big_data_mor.html and http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/apr/25/forget-big-data-small-data-revolution. There are also advocates for “slow data” (see for example, http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1460, http://brandsavant.com/the-slow-data-movement/).

⁷⁹ There are an increasing number of web services that promise to provide integrative views of your different banking, spending, and investment accounts. Mint (https://www.mint.com/) is arguably the most well-known of these services. But several alternate services are also available (see for example, http://www.moneyunder30.com/mint-alternatives-comparing-adaptu-personal-capital-and-manilla, http://www.xconomy.com/national/2013/02/22/i-switched-from-mint-com-to-pageonce-maybe-you-should-too/, and http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/08/11/look-out-mint-moneystrands-worthy-money-management-competition/).

⁸⁰ The made-for-television series “Revolution,” for example, portrayed a world after the lights (and electricity) have gone out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series)).

⁸¹ For non-electrical options in the high-capacity storage of information, you might also track developments in Microsoft’s “immortal computing” initiative (http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?News-Num=924).

⁸² By Google’s own estimate, for example, “2010 footprint was 1,449,825 tonnes of CO2” using as much electricity annually as 220,000 people (http://www.google.com/green/bigpicture/references.html). “Google accounts for roughly 0.013 percent of the world’s energy use” (http://techland.time.com/2011/09/09/6-things-youd-never-guess-about-googles-energy-use/#ixzz2YNVH1i4i). See also http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-and-defends-its-use-of-electricity.html or http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2035382/Google-discloses-energy-consumption--power-Salt-Lake-City.html or try searching on “power consumption by google” (as your search completes you will have consumed the approximately the electricity needed to run a 60W light bulb for 17 seconds).

⁸³ See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage. “DNA-based storage may be cost-effective for archives of several megabytes with a 600–5,000-yr horizon” (Goldman et al., 2013, p2). See also popular coverage, http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424127887324539304578259883507543150.html, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130724-saving-civilisation-in-one-room, http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21570671-archives-could-last-thousands-years-when-stored-dna-instead-magnetic, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9236176/DNA_
may_soon_be_used_for_storage.