The Original Log

Why do we log in? Or log on? (The difference is, in the first case, you provide credentials). Many people might guess that the log, also in genre terms like blog and vlog, looks back to record-keeping in pre-digital terms. They’d be right. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Here I propose it looks back to the ship’s log...

The ship’s log is usually understood to be a text, a record of conditions and events during a watch, or set period of several hours, during which some of the crew ensure a ship’s safe sailing. The officer on watch completes the log and the captain approves it.

But a log is also just that, a log, a piece of wood. Suitably weighted, a piece of wood was put astern. Attached to it was a log-line which had knots, usually every fifty feet. A sand-glass measured twenty-eight seconds while somebody counted how many knots ran by. That gave sailors a speed in knots (with a nautical mile = 6,000 feet.)

So a log of wood can help you work out how far you’ve come from your last position. That makes it an apt base for updates of subjectivity, or indeed activating any system of accessing such position-taking. Do we not all log on to our digital devices?

Several terms central to the self online are related. Blog is a contraction of weblog, or web-log. It was invented by Peter Merholz in 1999; by March 2019, according to Wikipedia, the blogging platform Tumblr was hosting over 459 million blogs (for comparison, there were 7.7 billion people in the world at the same date.) Blog gave rise to vlog, or video log, and lifelogging, or the process of tracking personal data generated by our own activities. One pioneer of lifelogging was Gordon Bell, who with the help of Jim Gemmell uploaded what he calls “everything” in his project MyLifeBits – “photos, computer activity, biometrics… The result? An amazing enhancement of human experience from health and education to productivity.”¹

Lifelogging focuses on collecting personal data for the benefit of the user. Lifeglogging, on the other hand, devised by Steve Mann,² is a log that does not take conscious effort to generate, since it is produced by a machine (mostly a wearable camera). Glog is short for CYBORGlog.

Logging in, logging off, logging out are terms that appear in 1963, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which records them as issuing from the M.I.T. Computation Center. The concept of the captain’s log was popularized by Star Trek as a means of recording (often in voice-over) the movements in time and space of the starship USS Enterprise as it moved around the galaxy.³

Of course logging in its oldest sense, cutting trees for timber, predates the ship’s log (back to 1398, logges, from the Latin lignis.) But I like to think it is that beautiful moment of transference from material object (log of wood) to text (ship’s log) that haunts the inspired coinages of digital logs.

Happy sailing!