THE NEW INTERACTIVE DIARY
By Robert Sheckley


 

Illustration by Nick Bertozzi

 

A lot of you keep journals and diaries on your computer. I do, and have been doing so for years. My entries are typically on a diversity of subjects, written as honestly as possible, and continued over a period of years. Over time they build up a portrait of me and my opinions, hopes, fears, concerns. The trouble is, I can't see that portrait. I am too immersed in the daily details. I can never step back and get an entire picture.

I wish it were otherwise. These notes could give me an idea, not just of where I've been, but of where I'm going next, mentally, morally, physically. They could show me my fears. They could illustrate the changes I undergo over a period of time. 

The problem is how to gain insight from all this. Since the general rule is, only the writer of a personal journal reads it, no one else can give you insight into it. You are alone with your thoughts. Physician, heal thyself. But having yourself as your doctor is never recommended. This makes it difficult to gain insight from what you write.

And then there's the diverse and often repetitious nature of the entries themselves. Anyone who keeps a journal knows how quickly the entries can accumulate, and how simple and repetitious they can be. ("Thursday. Felt like hell. Friday. Ditto. Sat. More of the same...") Or how spider weblike they can be: "So Samantha talked to Herb, about that thing I told her last month, which she promised never to tell anyone. But she told Herb "for my own good" and Herb said he would never speak to me again..." How do you get useful insight out of entries like these?

It is a council of perfection to expect you to re-read and indwell your entries over a period of months and years. Many of us have just about enough time to write a journal, but not enough time to re-read and study it. And just about no one has time to annotate it with (hopefully) useful comments. A lot of us have barely enough time to live, and no time to consider how we are living and how we might do better.

One solution to this problem appeared recently in the New York Times, on Thurs, June 5, '03, in an op-ed editorial titled "Dear DARPA Diary," by William Safire. 

Safire describes "Lifelog", the all-remembering cyber diary, which is part of DARPA'S "cognitive computing" research. 

Through the wonders of "cognitive computing," Lifelog is meant to morph your computer or digital assistant into your "lifelong partner in memory." 

In some way unexplained in plain language, specially designed software will do the work of insight and present you with the results. It will also serve as a Personal Assistant, integrating your appointments, store phone numbers, birthdays, anniversaries, etc., into your DARPA diary data. 

It would read, analyze, even recommend.

Darpa's idea was to put all of this data into a national memory bank, where you and everyone else--the F.B.I., the C.I.A, the Secretary for Defense--would have access.

This idea gave me instant paranoia, despite the fact that my life is pure as driven snow.

But it seemed DARPA hadn't gotten that far yet. All this was mostly in the ideational stage. 

So much for bureaucratic dreams. 

But, as I soon found out, this grandiose scheme had already been implemented by private parties. 

I learned about that this morning when a pop up ad invited me to check out "PersonalCogDiary.com. This, it said, was the new personal and private diary system, with no links to government data bases, such as DARPA had.

I called it up, and found that newly developed "summarizing and generalizing software," together with "projective enhancements," had already been at work on my material. In fact, they had used me as a test case, free of charge. They had already gone to work on the computerized journal entries I've been keeping for years. 

Obviously, these guys don't fool around. 

I was outraged at this intervention into my personal life. But I turned at once to the "Suggestions for Better Living for Robert Sheckley." 

Under Relationships it said, "Four major ones and you still haven't gotten it right. What makes you think you're going to work it out better this time? Might it not be better to give up this attempt at a 'normal' life and avail yourself of some of the other possibilities the world has to offer?"

For example, "The Marriage Rearrangement Brokerage Service" of Bangkok, Thailand, had a connecting site, called "Happy Husbands," which promised to put me together with a comely and patient young lady, in a short term consensual agreement with definite time-limits and reasonable commitments.

I thought that sounded pretty interesting. But what would I do in Thailand? How could I afford to live there? 

I entered "You and Your Income," and learned, not to my surprise, that in a world sense I was not doing well but not so badly, either. I was practically a millionaire as compared to the average wage-earner in Sri Lanka or Pakistan. My problem, according to the entry, was that I was living in the wrong place to get my dollars to buy what I wanted out of life. 

The "Your Job" entry, under "Work Disatisfactions and Solutions," told me I did not have to live in America, and had I considered an alternative? I could cash out, take my money and social security and pension, and go to Mexico or Thailand, to name but two. And there I could live high on the hog. I could have a temporary wife for as long as I wanted her. And so on.

Checking "religion," I found the comment, "You didn't make it as a Jew. What makes you think you'll find happiness as a Buddhist?" Maybe I was tired, but I couldn't think of much to say to that. Especially when the next entry, "Summary of Spiritual Position," pointed out that by the evidence in my journal, my main interest was neither with God or godlessness, and certainly not in spirituality. My main interest, far overshadowing all others, was in my own writing.

All this gave me the feeling that some part of me was watching me and weighing the evidence presented in my journal, and coming to some conclusions. 

This worried me. I wondered how secure this material was. Were my personal tastes already in the hands of advertisers? 

I shut down the computer, took a short nap, went for a walk, came back and fired up again. I keyed in the word "cogpersdiary" and Google couldn't find it. I tried all the permutations of that name. Nothing.

I spent hours trying to find the site again. I checked all the thousands of entries for "diary", and "Journal," I called in a friend, an expert hacker. He couldn't find what I was looking for, either, and insisted I must have imagined the whole thing. 

I prefer to think I was the victim of something like vaporware--a program put out for experimental purposes, and withdrawn for changes and improvements, maybe to add more bells and whistles.

At present I am still looking for the site. Anybody got any suggestions? And I am considering moving to Thailand, though the title "Happy Husbands" fails to come up, and does not appear in the Bangkok Yellow Pages."