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As noted, I did a panel last night on lifelogging with Jerry Paffendorf and Susan and Arin of the film Four Eyed Monsters, which is playing for another week at Cinema Village in New York. I don’t know if anyone had a good idea of what they were going to talk about ahead of time, but the panel turned out to be a lot of fun for us, and seemed to be an interesting experience for the audience, who were happy to share their thoughts with us in turn.

One of the things we touched on was how one expresses identity online, through means like MySpace, YouTube, blogs or your behavior in an online world. One of the things that’s most interesting to me about the film is how Susan and Arin expressed their identities to each other in an offline context. Before they even met, they decided that they’d communicate simply through written notes rather than speaking. Though they speak freely to each other now, the film chronicles some interesting moments in their relationship: not just the moments when one or the other of them found the notes too much to bear, but just the way they unfolded themselves to each other through writing, a much slower process than through speaking, as we normally would. The written word, of course, carries a lot less information than the voice. Not only are there vocal inflections and mannerisms to read, but there’s an element of spontaneity that writing can’t capture. Susan and Arin forgo that channel, though, in favor of getting to know each other through the much narrower band of text. As Jerry pointed out, it’s almost as if their relationship took place in text chat.

One of the interesing ideas that came up early on in the discussion was that lifelogging (i.e., the practice of recording one’s day-to-day movements, one’s Internet searches, as many details of one’s life as you care to record) may be only the latest manifestation of an impulse that’s thousands of years old. (Okay, so it was me that brought this up, but I just keyed off something Susan had said, and it was an idea that came to me on the spot.) Think of the cave paintings at Lascaux, which are thought to be more than 10,000 years old and are often cited as one of the earliest example of the human impulse to art (though there are earlier examples). But what if these are less art than an early example of the human impulse to history, to record oneself through whatever means are at hand, and in that act to somehow create a representation of identity (individual or collective) that’s not unlike the identity we create online through tools like MySpace or in virtual worlds?

Now, there’s the caveat that this idea is probably nothing new; the literary theorists I didn’t read in school have covered this kind of ground pretty thoroughly. But it’s interesting to consider the possibility that the lifelogging Susan and Arin did in chronicling their relationship (they filmed everything, much of which went into their movie) is only a contemporary version of cave painting. It’s people using the tools at hand to record the moments of their lives.

In an era when we have tools like digital cameras, Flickr, Facebook, blogs, YouTube and online storage at our disposal (not to mention whatever else you want to cite), the idea carries an interesting weight. And the evidence is that at least the younger cohort takes to this kind of recording naturally. Blogs, MySpace pages and YouTube are filled with the personal details of millions of lives. And the kind of personal information about tastes and habits that many companies collect, far from being dangerous or somehow making you vulnerable, is seen by many people as an advantage, in that it allows companies to serve you better: Why get advertisements for classical albums if all you ever buy is hip-hop? The truth is probably somewhere in between, but it does seem that the coming swell of sentiment is in favor of making much of that information available in a way that would allow us to better navigate the range of choices out there.

Arin touched on a related idea: that we might one day be able to control all this information we’re putting out there ourselves, so that rather than Netflix knowing all the movies you rented and Amazon knowing all the books you bought, that information would reside with you, and you’d decide who and when to give it out to. This is an outstanding idea, of course, and there are people working on similar issues. But I think we’re still years off from this. It takes not only the storage resource, in some form that many, many people will adopt, but also the means for companies to receive and use that information, as well as the willingness. What it will probably take is a big company to take a chance on the model and succeed in a manner that will open new doors. If it happens at all.

Susan talked about the fact that in editing the film, they’d come across arguments they’d been having over and over again for a year, about the same things, in the same contexts. Seeing evidence of this on the raw tapes was an eye-opener for her, and she talked about the possibility that this kind of information might be able to be collected in an organized fashion, so that such lessons might be more easily learned. Susan was also clear that lifelogging was not a self-indulgent enterprise but a way to collect valuable information about oneself.

Jerry spoke about the changes in technology that will eventually make things like lifelogging easier and more accessible. Advances in storage, bandwidth and penetration that are on the horizon will put these tools in the hands of more people than ever. And if current trends continue, more people will want to use them.

I also mentioned an idea I’ve always been fascinated with, which is the impossiblility of autobiography. You can never paint a perfectly accurate picture of yourself, and not just because you’re always changing. Not only does the act of recording yourself somehow change who you are (viz. Schrodinger), even if only a little bit, but who you are affects how you record yourself. Of course, this again is territory well covered by the above-mentioned literary theorists, but it’s interesting to think about in the context of a discussion of lifelogging.

Read more notes from The Film Panel Notetaker, who gets the award for the best self-explanatory blog name evar.