This morning I woke with the sudden urge to remember everything of note that I’ve done.
I soon realised that for me the past is not as searchable as I would like. And the present seems pretty hard to sift through. When I was young I wrote a diary. From age 11 to 14 I’d write the days happenings in school exercise books. I’ve not seen them for maybe 15 years. I remember them not being massively interesting. “Climbed a tree.. Did my homework.. Fed the chickens.” From 1991 to 2000 I’d sporadically fill small moleskin notebooks with slightly more interesting tales as I worked my way round the world. Adventure was war, drink, death, luxury, buddhism, isolation, food, sickness, poverty, travel, friendship, music and joy. I still have these scrawled diaries. Crammed into a briefcase waiting to be typed up. Now I blog. Mostly in audio, sometimes in video, occasionally text. This morning I wanted to remember stories I had not thought about for years. Nothing came. I tend to need a nudge. Something someone will say will trigger a memory and everything relative to that point will come flooding back. Places do this, photos do this. As do smells. I forget what the psychological term for this is. I forget a lot. Especially as nowadays I entrust so much of my life to zeros and one’s. The stories I pass on orally appear more solid. As I rewrite them in my mind, they are also in the minds and on the tongues of those listening and sharing. Providing we keep sharing. The memories in my paper notebooks seem fragile, but if looked after could last longer than lifetimes. I have the strange feeling that the last 10 years of my digital archives could be snuffed out in an instant. That they just hang there, suspended in an electronic web or balanced on a silicon slice. I hope the future brings better ways to archive and retrieve our stories. Until then, we have to keep sharing in the hope the stories survive in their telling.
Some insightful thoughts. I too have diaries from my youth, sometimes I read them and it reminds me of the mind of a teenager and I think of my Son. It would be interesting to see how many long time bloggers kept hand written diaries when they were kids – is there a link? I also wonder about today’s generation blogging or Facebooking their feelings publicly rather than clearing their head privately.I somehow feel our paper diaries are more fragile than our digital data and could go up in flames or be lost, but at the same time understand that there are man made inventions out there designed to disrupt electronics. Maybe the solution is to digitise our diaries (a photo of each page), print out out blogs and translate our audio.I think this all brigs us squarely back to backups and I worry about the trust we put in free services. If a blog service had a catastrophic failure and corrupted some sites, do people have them saved elsewhere?My family photos are the most precious digital items that I own, I go to great lengths to duplicate their content going back to my first digital camera in 1999. Even in 2011, I still hear horror stories of drive failures and fires and continue to be amazed that people’s important data only sits in one physical location.Anyway, I’ve probably gone off the point here! but if anyone reading this hasn’t got a Posterous backup in place, take a look at a post about the importance of autoposting http://bit.ly/a01VKHRich
You revisit this theme of safeguarding memories regularly, and each time, it moves me a lot, as it certainly is a theme dear not only to my heart and my efforts, but also to my culture and tradition. In two weeks, in the Jewish tradition we will celebrate the holiday of Passover (pessah’) when one of the main ritual is the retelling of the exodus. The telling of those stories, in a very faithful way, has certainly kept the people and their history well alive, and it is a duty that is thoroughly tought to teach our children and pass the stories along.
This is something I often ponder too. I wonder how historians and archaeologists of the future will unearth our history of the modern day? I can just imagine a future episode of “Time Team” when they get exited as they fin another hard drive buried deep beneath a field and how they then excitedly work their way through historic connectors. “John, try the USB 2 connector”, “oh my gosh, what on earth was that?”. “Don’t worry, they have loads in the Science museum”. “Science what was that?”
Thanks for the comments guys. Food for thought for sure..
I don’t know if it helps, but the psychological word you’re thinking of maybe “engram”. An engram is an emotionally charged memory, which is why traumatic and dramatic events are remembered so much more vividly, normally through the ways in which our senses are manipulated through sound, vision and touch.It is interesting that you remember more using more modern diary recording methods, perhaps it is because they are more recent memories or because you are ‘in the moment’ as you record. I have always thought a physical action (without a screen) in diary writing helps create stronger memories.