Mobile phone is the optimal life biography tool

The mobile phone is a personal, always with you, multimedia, and communication device. Much of the planet uses one. These characteristics make the mobile phone the optimal tool for recording your life in a biographical narrative while you live it. People can’t always determine in advance when something significant will happen. Some events only prove significant in hindsight. Using your mobile phone to capture your life narrative and memories solves these issues.

Andy Rubin recently wrote an entry for the Google 10th anniversary blog about the unprecedented success of the mobile phone as a consumer device. He covers the usual points about the market size (about 3.2 billion) and ubiquity, while also highlighting one of our favorite talking points; the device you carry in your pocket today is more powerful than the computer you used in 1999. For perspective, this is likely the computer on which you first surfed the web and were using during the internet and tech bubble! He lists some of his thoughts on how people will use the mobile phone over the next 10 years. These thoughts include smart alerts, crowd sourcing, and augmented reality. I’d add a version of the title of this post, “Life biography and memory recording tool” as a bullet point to Mr. Rubin’s list of what people will use their mobile for in the future.

Personal ongoing biography complements M. Rubin’s ideas of crowd sourcing and smart alerts. For example, aggregated networked biography enables crowd sourcing the historic record, opening rich new vistas for future historians’ analysis and reshaping the way history is written.