A few weeks ago I reorganized my bedroom closet. This alone may be worthy of a blogpost, but I won’t bore you with recounting the small joy that this task brought me. What struck me about the process, from a cultural perspective, was the sheer volume of paper memories I found myself sorting through and reordering. Ten photo albums. Two file crates of stories and poems I wrote as a child and adolescent. Four different memento boxes of written correspondence from friends, family, and former girlfriends dating from high school through the recent present. A thick stack of letters from my grandmother, starting in college and continuing through her death in 1999. A shoebox of love letters, another shoebox of random photographs, a pile of birthday cards. All handwritten. All saved. All newly organized on a shelf in my closet. All ready to be grabbed up in case of a fire.
I always imagined that I would re-read these letters someday on my porch sitting in my rocking chair when I was old and gray. I would revisit the words, the thoughts, the feelings, the handwriting of people I know and love, of people I knew and loved. But as I was organizing, I became painfully aware of a gap. The collection had dwindled substantially over the past eight years, slowing to barely a drip of birthday cards and the occasional sweet letter sent by a former partner. But essentially the paper trail dries up around 2002. It noticeably dries up. Why? Because my correspondents and I stopped sending mail and instead used electronic means almost exclusively.
My question that day, surrounded by boxes on the floor and letters and photos strewn about my bed, was this: how will we organize, preserve, and retrieve our memories, our special moments, our correspondence, in the digital age? We communicate via email, we post our digital photos on Flicker and Facebook, we text message quips and best wishes and intimate confessions. But how many of these will be saved? When we are old and gray, will we sit in rocking chairs and peruse our laptop, reread thousands of emails, and revisit texts stored on old cell phones? And if so, will anything be lost? Or gained?
Perhaps the age we live in has merely required us to be more selective. To print out the few emails that mean something to us, file them away, and let the rest pass into the past. On more than one occasion I’ve been accused of holding on too much to my personal history, as I’ve carted these memories around from apartment to apartment over the years. Granted, I do. But mail has meant something to me in a way email hasn’t. Maybe it’s not the medium but the message that counts here. Still, I think reading the handwriting of others invokes a certain kind of memory, connection, and closeness in us. Do standard text fonts have the same power? I suppose we’ll find out in the years to come.
Nice questions Adam. I was asking my students about this in class this semester (related to A Midwife’s Tale). We talked about “journaling” as children, and most of them had no idea what I was talking about. …I’m sure historians will have new challenges when they can’t decipher these ancient electronic files…
Laura: I wonder if your/our students use blogs or even Facebook as the equivalent to journaling these days.
I have often wondered many of these same questions. This post seems even more relevant now that the Library of Congress has started archiving Tweets. But, that effort seems more aimed at historians and scholars. As for a personal archive like the paper archives in your closet (and like the boxes of photos and letters I also keep stored away), I am not sure anything electronic can ever represent memories the same way. The iPad seems to have fueled the “no more paper” movement, but like you I suspect something valuable will be lost when all we have are iScrapbooks. It may be a loss of contact (as in, this person touched this object) or “closeness” as you call it.
Rachael: Thanks for your comment. Yes, very timely announcement from the Library of Congress. Related to Laura’s post above, if the current young generation is barely even keeping a paper trail, then perhaps their experience of “closeness” is/will be vastly different from those of us who grew up with typewriters and snail mail and printed photos. Perhaps they will never even consider that closeness is absent.