Keeping a record of your life0

I read this interesting article earlier [ A future without personal history ] and it’s something i’ve thought about myself before now. We generally no longer send and receive letters, most of our correspondence is now done electronically so how do you keep a record? Wouldn’t it be nice if in 100 years from now some relative could find some of your love letters or journals tucked away in an old trunk up the attic? Unless of course you are a complete psychopath leading a questionable life but anyway …

The author go on to say he is storing his IM’s, text messages, emails, facebook comments, tweets ….!? WHAT!? Now surely that would be the equivalent of storing every scrap bit of paper you have ever scribbled a note on. Who is sad enough to want to pore over that level of shite?

All this talk of backing up your every electronic communication to the web such as a blog (websites go out of business and vanish and a blog will vanish when you do unless someone is paying for your bills!) or the cloud (again, these things could vanish), hard drives (easily damaged) CD’s (are you kidding me? Mine last a max of 5 years) and so on. There is another way. First of all no one wants to read through every SMS, tweet and facebook comment you ever wrote – hopefully they have a life. So why not narrow it down to a few quality entries per week – even just one if your too busy tweeting/texting/etc?

But where to keep such a thing? Ok here’s a radical thought, how about ….

I don’t know about you but if i have any thoughts, doodles, photo’s, memories or special bits of communication then i keep them in a journal. I don’t mean an iPad app called iJournal (eurgh) i mean one made from paper. When we have days out i usually take photos and i always print them off (screw digital photo frames) and i put our favourite photo in my journal along with a bit of yak about the day.

Much nicer to look back on than a collection of texts/mails/comments/tweets/posts scattered all over the web/drives/discs in my opinion.