2 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age The reason why you will become attracted to this topic is evident, even if you are not a researcher or practitioner in one of the relevant fi elds. Personal content experience – capturing, enjoying, and sharing our digital past and present – inherently concerns us all to a large degree. Understanding this vibrant area of research, development, and everyday life is what this book is about. 1.1 Digital Us You are becoming digital. Already, your life is digital in many ways. Increasingly everything you do with other people, and the world around you, is digital. Like it or not, you are part of a great information whirl- wind that weaves your digital life patterns with those of myriads of other people – and machines. A remarkable part of your digital life is being stored by authorities, your employer, hospitals, the loyal customer program of your favourite chain store, and countless others. This information about you identifi es you, stores your medical history, skills, salary history, behaviour as a consumer, and, indeed, faults and committed crimes, if any. You do not have much control over it, except for some reviewing and reclama- tion cases. This is essential information about you, and the conse- quences of possible errors may be severe. Yet you are not responsible for its maintenance. The information described above is information about you. Yet it is not yours, since you do not possess it nor can freely control it. When discussing your digital life, the other side of the coin is your personal information, something that is important to you and that you possess. This is information that we refer to as personal content,1 the topic of this book. Your personal content is among the fi rst aspects of your life to go digital. Your daily communications, photographs, favourite music and movies, heart rate and step count logs, contacts stored in your mobile phone, and frequently travelled routes are, among other content types, your personal content. All digital, all existing in a virtual realm consist- ing of a series of 0s and 1s, all created either implicitly or explicitly with a myriad of digital devices, such as camcorders, GPS navigators, or mobile phones. This is content that you are responsible for taking care of; it is content that is meaningful to you; it is content that you 1 In many contexts the term personal information is associated with offi ce activities, such as calendar, to-do items, and e-mail as implied by the common acronym PIM (Personal Information Management). This is why we prefer the term “content”.