This week, I began chronicling my around- the-world backpacking trip at OurStory.com, a social networking web site designed to animate your life experiences on a visually stimulating timeline logged with your photographs and videos. I plugged in my birth, engagement and wedding day story complemented with pictures. Trolling through my digital photo albums made me realize that these images needed my voice, my words and my emotions to tell the whole story. After showing my husband the timeline and reading the story of our wedding and engagement aloud to him, tears welled in my eyes. Logging my memories gave me an unexpected sense of achievement, now my memories won’t fade or worse vanish with age. I recognize the importance of OurStory especially after spending time with people in the culminating hours of their lives while researching my book “Parting Ways” and in my own meandering personal experiences.
This foray into transferring my experiences into digital memories was homework before interviewing Andy Halliday, the CEO of OurStory for my book. I also spent an evening reading the stories of his life beginning with his birth to the recent launch of OurStory last year. His extensive profile connected to the timelines of his family members inspired me.
Spending time on the site reminded me of lounging on my cousin’s living room couch reminiscing and catching up. OurStory has privacy controls so that you don’t have to show the whole world your life. Some of my stories are public and others are private. The site instantly struck me as a place I’d like to remain connected to over my lifetime. The “Question Sets”, a bank of evocative questions, triggered vivid memories from all stages of my life, even as early as three years old. I think the questions could be used to prompt children to engage their parents and grandparents in interviews about family history. In this case, technology stimulates a dynamic inter-generational conversation and maybe even a project.
My father died of cancer when he was 37 and the day we buried his body, we also buried his life story. I’m haunted by so many unanswered questions about his life. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer 14 years later, I swore not to make the same mistake. By then, I was a journalist trained in the art of interviewing and chronicling everyday life. I used an audio recorder and video camera to capture my mother’s life story in her words. I asked her every conceivable question my brain could generate in an effort to make sure she didn’t leave this world and me with unanswered questions. Our interviews became a place where we both came to talk openly and honestly about her past, our past, the present, and make preparations for her departure and my future.
Although, I didn’t know it at the time, I engaged her in a life review. Robert Butler, renowned gerontologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Why Survive? Being Old in America”, describes Life Review as “a personal process by which a person evaluates his or her life as it nears its end. This spontaneous psychological event is seen especially when one is confronted by death. The overall benefit of a life review is that it can engender hard-won serenity, a philosophical acceptance of what has occurred in the past, and wisdom,” Butler said. If a life review is shared with children and grandchildren, the person is able to “bequeath his or her intellectual and spiritual knowledge and leave memories in the minds of others.”
“That’s really at the heart of what the value proposition of OurStory at its founding was to create a better and more fluid conversation around life and important subjects among the family while you are still alive, instead of the drivel we normally talk about; some context to say the things you wanted to say and to reflect deeply about what you’ve experienced and what you’ve learned from that,” Andy Halliday said when talking about the evolution of OurStory. The questions and tools on OurStory would have served as a resourceful guide to synthesizing our interviews, her words with photographs on a timeline and ultimately could’ve been published into a keepsake hardbound book. She loved organizing our photos into albums and even indexed all the photo negatives to store in our bank safety deposit box. I know she would’ve relished collaborating with me on an OurStory timeline.
So, I began to wonder how technology has reinvented the way we tell our life stories. I posed the question to Halliday. “Historically, storytelling was easily rehearsed and memorized by successive generations because the village was together and you would be able to hear the same story, over and over and over as it was told over years,” Halliday said. “So then you would remember the story that your grandfather told around the campfire and you would tell that story about that ancestor to your children.
“There was a tighter concentration of transmittal whereas today we are very much more distributed and families dissolve in effect, and they go different ways and there’s not that place where storytelling occurs anymore in just oral tradition. “Where is the oral tradition? Especially in families where there is hardly even a family dinner table anymore. So technology is in effect creating those not geographically bounded connections again so that stories can be told remotely, at the same time recording them so they are easier to repeat, rehearse and refer to. Things blew a part so the oral tradition was lost but now technology has a potential for reconnecting and recreating an oral tradition of sorts that can survive generation to generation.”
Over the past year, I’ve spent many hours on interviews with a life review guide and cameraman video recording people at the end of their lives reflecting on their family histories, birth stories, love stories, rites of passage, service in the military, career paths, first homes, mistakes made, regrets, spiritual journeys and lessons learned for posterity. Depending on the person’s mental agility, some of the episodes shared are sensory-rich with details, as if the person is reliving the moment, while other reminiscences are muddled.
I’ve also attended a life review interview where an entire family (three generations) gathered around their father just days before his death. Donna, a life review interviewer, began by asking the father when and where he was born. The red light blinked on both digital video cameras propped up on a tripods in the bedroom. After three minutes of silence in the room and the entire family leaning their ears toward the deathbed, the father said in a voice a few decibels above a whisper “Idaho”. I looked at his sons and grandson from out of state and realized they’d gathered to listen and record their patriarch’s story too late. The microphone attached to the father’s pajamas lapel couldn’t even capture his voice over the buzz of the electric blanket. My eyes fell on the bald, gaunt man withered in his hospital bed. I imagined his life story trapped inside that body like a locked treasure chest or vault that we could not unlock. We couldn’t crack the code. We didn’t have the key. He could no longer speak. His family scrambled around the cameraman asking him to film their reflections of him. He obliged but their father’s story vanished with his last breath a few days later. I knew exactly how they felt.
I found a radical solution to lost memories in this week’s New Yorker called Remember When? Lifelogging is just as it sounds a lifelong project to digitally record every interaction, transaction, conversation, thought and emotion while tracking the location, date and time. Sound a bit too SCI-FI, out of our reach, over the top and obsessive. Gordon Bell, a 72-year-old researcher at Microsoft and early architect of networking supercomputers now called the Internet, is engaged in a lifelogging experiment.
For nearly three years, Bell has walked around with a “SenseCam”a small camera, worn around his neck that “passively takes wide-angle pictures without user intervention.” He uses a digital audio recorder to collect his thoughts and or conversations.
In 1998, he created a digital archive of his life by scanning every piece of paper and artifact collected including the papers in his file cabinets, memos, books in his library, books he’s authored, his collection of family photo albums and home movies. His life is now entirely paperless so nothing will be lost, thrown out or burned in a fire. Bell found it difficult to wade through the sea of digital data. He eventually design MyLifeBits, a Microsoft program that stores “everything” in a digital archive cataloging with time, dates, maps and other search options for easy access. It looks similar to the organizing principles on OurStory.
The digital memories era has dawned with tiny digital cameras, video cameras and camera phones that record voice, video and images to capture our live real time interactions with the world. I just returned from a scuba dive trip in Maui, where my husband and I dove some beautiful sites called the Cathedrals off the coast of Lanai, and our dive master happened to focus a digital video camera on us while we explored below the ocean surface and serendipitously met and swam with a pod of about 60 spinner dolphins. When I began my timeline at OurStory this week, I asked my husband to call the dive master and get that valuable footage. “I want to include it in the timeline of our lives,” I said.
We have no excuse to have no digital memories of our lives. We don’t have to go to the extreme as Bell, but one day his lifelogging project will more than likely be the norm. Technology has made it easily accessible and cheap to digitally record our life. In an article titled A Digital Life, Bell and his partner, Jim Gemmel say, “Perhaps most important, digital memories can enable all people to tell their life stories to their descendants in a compelling, detailed fashion that until now has been reserved solely for the rich and famous.”
Posted by dcarson 
