lifespan.txt
This is the contents of a file called “lifespan.txt” that I wrote a long time ago.
Time and age are fundamental things. The web hasn’t quite gone there yet.
When Kurt Vonnegut was asked by his grandchild about why the world was so screwed up and polluted and bad, and what he and the rest of the older generation had done so wrong, he famously replied:
“Don’t look at me. I just got here myself”.
http://www.vonnegutweb.com/vonnegutia/commencement/syracuse.html
Lifespan is a way to see how your life fits into the larger timeline. Which larger timeline? The larger timeline.
It lets you collect together, visualise and tend to your web footprint… but in a ‘long now’ way, rather than a ‘real time’ way.
Your web footprint is all the stuff you have put on the web using life-capturing web applications: all your photos, tweets, comments, blog posts, scrobbles, dopplr travels, location check-ins, daytum datapoints… everything that can be accessed. Let’s call all of that ‘lifedata’.
Your web footprint is all existing and all future possible data from the lifedata-capturing webapps. It’s out there now.
Your web footprint is a very recent thing, though. A histogram with time as the x-axis and ‘amount of lifedata’ on the y-axis would, for most webby people in 2010, look a bit like this:
| ...
| /
| /
amount of | /
lifedata | /
| /
|<-------- before webapps --------> /
|___________________________________--/
|_________________________________________________
...1980 1990 2000 2010
So, web footprints are relatively recent, and there’s a big gap in most people’s web footprint, reaching back from the birth of Flickr/Facebook/Twitter et al. all the way back to their birth.
Most webapps are realtime or thereabouts. But some webapps allow you to postdate things. Flickr is an example: you can add photos that were taken in 1984, edit their date to reflect this, and they’ll appear in the graph above. But they are the minority.
| ...
| /
| /
amount of | * /
lifedata | ^ /
| | /
|<-------|- before webapps --------> /
|________|___________________________-/
|________|_________________________________________
...1980 1990 2000 2010
Lifespan is a way to attach all your data to a unified timeline that represents your lifespan. Everything in the app is displayed to a correct chronological scale relative to this timeline.
|
|......................................________...
|
amount of |
lifedata |
|
|
|
|_________________________________________________
...1980 1990 2000 2010
Compare your lifespan to people and things around you.
Put in your family (some won’t have any ‘footprint’), but also compare to your friends who do, and who actively add to theirs.
Visualise how your lifespan overlaps with others’ lifespans, and how it looks compared to today.
How much does your lifespan overlap with your grandparents’? Their parents’? with major world events, like wars, JFK, 9/11?
This helps to answer the major questions of ‘where were you when…?’ You could even add where your parents were when JFK was shot. Ask your grandmother.
Start with broad brush-strokes, and get more specific. Where were you born? Where did you move? Where did you go? Add holidays if you can remember them. Add the exact locations of your school, your previous homes, your university, your favourite places. When were you definitely there? Can you prove it? If so, add supporting evidence. This evidence is equivalent to having done it in real time. If you don’t have evidence, then it’s a memory rather than a part of the core footprint. If several people can corroborate a memory, because they were all there, then it gets stronger.
How far have you travelled in your life? How many of London’s tube stations have you been through? How many books have you read? How many albums do you have? What things do you own? How long have you had your Brompton? When did you get your first computer? And your second, and your third? When did you meet your friends? (Some of these things are only viewable by you…)
- major events: where were you?
- key life stages: what were they?
- elections: how did you vote? (who won?)
Each of these questions could be added in a modular way… by other people as well as you.
- twitter - your thoughts and observations
- flickr - your photos and videos
- last.fm - what you’ve been listening to
- fireeagle - where you are
- google maps - location
- wikipedia - reference info
Use wikipedia and other sources of chronological info to build the public timeline - the footprint of countries, cultures, etc.
Lifespans of bands, cultural phenomena, political movements, governments, wars. How much did your life overlap with the life of John Lennon? How old were you when… Were you alive when Elvis was alive?
- when you were at primary school, I was learning to walk.
- when you were at university, I was travelling round the world
- when I was born, the Berlin wall was being taken down
It appeals to lots of human curiosities and desires, combines elements of social networking with capturing your life, looking at your past and future. Could appeal to people interested in family history, other types of history.