A Future Without Personal History [RWW Post]

Posted: January 19th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Philosophy, Web/Tech | Tags: , , | 7 Comments »

My second article for ReadWriteWeb was posted today.

It discusses how written letters are a very effective historical item, because they detail entire relationships and friendships. As we become more and more a digital society, all of our communication is being frequently lost as our email storage fills up, or we get a new mobile phone. I argue that unless we start actively trying to store our communications, we will lose these aspects of our personal history forever.

All of this information that is so important and so relevant to me personally is just disappearing, and I won’t be able to track the relationships and friendships that I have had.

You can read the full article by clicking here.

A comment on the post by Chris Neale caught my attention:

My advice to you wouldn’t be to archive everything. You’ll *never* go back to a complete archive (because you’d have to filter out all the meaningless drivel to get at any of the riches), but like you say it’s a huge amount of effort to actually build such an archive. So don’t bother.

Just write your girlfriend a letter, and post it, and enjoy the whole “retro-ness” of it all. In 30 years time it’ll mean a great deal to her more than a .zip file.

I think that’s really valuable information, and if I could go back and edit the post on RWW I would make that point. Thanks Chris!

Hope you’ll check the article out, because I can’t stress enough how important it is that people are aware of this issue.

  • Stathis Katinas

    Chris,
    I like your article very much. I believe that emails, SMS messages, and twits still did not manage to bring the power of a well written letter. But should we really need that much of space to save all our emails, our SMS, and our twits? Or should we consider to use them only when we very seriously need them?
    Do we ever spent some good time to consider what we are commenting when we write them? Like old generations use to do? And is that a reason why those letters are so much of importance now, maybe because those older generations really wrote comments that had a good meaning of their lifes? Do we do use the technology to mention importand issues and times of our lifes? I don’t think we do this so perfect as they did.

    But for sure I would keep some space to save your comment today for ever!

  • jsward

    Dear Michael,

    Seeing as this is under your “philosophy” category, I would encourage you to read Plato’s dialogue PHAEDRUS if you are interested in the connection between the durability of information and memory. Specifically Socrate’s telling if the myth of Thueth. You can find it in HTML here:http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html

    This was an interesting post. Keep up the good work.

    Joel

  • http://mmoorejones.com Michael Moore-Jones

    Hey Joel, thanks heaps for the suggestion! I am really interested in this topic, so will check it out right now. Really appreciate you taking the time to let me know about it! :)

  • Camille B.

    We had today at the DLA an interesting talk with Jeremy about games and gamification, you would have liked it. Anyways one of the videos that Jeremy showed us reminded me of this post you wrote, about remembering the past.
    You may not realise the immediate link with your post right away, but Jesse Schell concludes about this whole idea of remembering the past. Quite interesting / scary even when we think about it.http://www.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/I think you should try adding a bit more paper to your life, I love sending/receiving letters and cards despite my computer addiction and my 24/7 connection with the rest of the world…

  • http://mmoorejones.com Michael Moore-Jones

    I’m so gutted I missed the talk! Is anyone filming them? 

    Will watch that link now. Thanks for sharing it Camille!

  • Camille B.

    I don’t think so, sorry… You’re indeed missing great talks. Tonight we have both Google AND Microsoft coming! And tomorrow another talk too (I think from Web Wednesday the other day)
    However I did take a lot of notes (on paper!) from today’s Internet & Society talk, and I guess you could probably ask Jeremy for the slides…

  • http://mmoorejones.com Michael Moore-Jones

    Bugger! I know, I’ve sent some questions that I want asked to Kyky so hopefully she asks them :) 

    Would be great if I could see your notes when I’m back on Monday!