b natural. c sharp.

As we’ve been going through my recently departed grandma’s stuff, I’ve been thinking about the way things have changed regarding leaving stuff behind. Specifically, I’ve been pondering the recent way we document our lives so easily through computers and the internet, but questioning the permanence of the medium.

For example, I think about my blog… it’s like a diary, but not so personal and not so permanent. Are the things I say here worthy of backing up and preserving forever? I love adding photos to my blog, but what happens if the links no longer function and the pictures are gone because Flickr and Google destroyed each other in gruesome The War on Photo Services of 2020? I used to upload all of my pictures to my blog’s server but it proved to be too much trouble (and probably too much space for my friend who hosts it for free). At what point is it worth saving every page as a pdf so that the images stay in tact?

That leads me to photo albums. My life is documented in physical photo albums through about the end of high school. Thanks to my mom and her awesome scrapbook skills, there is a little bit of college stuff too. In addition to my parents’ photo albums, I have my own that documented every worthwhile event during middle and high school. Since then I’ve moved onto digital and probably haven’t printed out more than 20 pictures, if that. Digital photography is wonderful and easy - I love that you can edit and select worthwhile pictures without wasting film, however I rarely make prints. I am thankful that backing up your pictures is very easy and that gives them a sense of tangibility, but wonder if I should be doing it more. Maybe that will be a popular project for retirement years down the road, or maybe we’ll have some new crazy thing that will replace photos altogether. Holograms perhaps?? If Star Wars can have them, so can we.

Just something to think about.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 10:27 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.