Legacy MattersEamonn Fitzgerald writes a delightful blog from Ireland called Eamonn's Fitzgerald's Rainy Day has an eye out for new blogs. He welcomes David Marsh, a fortysomethingish Brit, who writes film reviews, works for a film distributor and runs an online store for children's shoes. David lives in Munich "with a wonderful wife and three delightful children who always behave and say please and thank you. David's blog Raising Chooks is about his adventures with his family.
I was more taken with Eamonn's observations
Those of us who have spent four or more decades on this earth will be familiar with the nostalgic thrill of going up to the attic or down to the basement to rummage around for the box filled with those family photos. Was that black-and-white gap-toothed demon really me? What were we doing to those sepia-tinted hens? The fog clears for a moment and the lost land of childhood is visible again.
In our Digital Age, the past will not be rendered as a box of disparate images. Microsoft, with MyLifeBits, is working on storing and presenting our memories. Senior Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell "has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio." Nokia's Lifeblog "automatically organizes your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages into a clear chronology you can easily browse, search, edit, and save." Using Lifeblog, you can "save your mobile images and other data in Nokia Lifeblog on your PC to start your own, ever-growing, life log."
Alongside these big-name ventures, the simple blog now offers parents, and children, an opportunity to chronicle the present and preserve the past. What a wonderful way of keeping the family occupied! And together! Not that one should idealize this kind of thing, though. The blog may turn into a slog and end up abandoned in cyberspace, like so many other websites.
I agree that we now have the digital tools available to chronicle our lives. And it's a wonderful thing. But collecting every damn piece of paper, every email, every photo and transcribed instant messages is not the way to do it. If you can't use your creativity to tell stories that family members and others want to hear and see again and keep, than a likely result will be a cursory look by survivors before deleting the entire contents of the hard drive before discarding the computer. I mean how many bad photos and inane emails will family members want to go through. Life has its dreary parts and so do many collections.
Posted by Jill Fallon at August 28, 2004 10:48 AM | Permalink