I have over 200,000 emails stored in my Yahoo mail account going back a decade. It struck me that this is quite an archive. Truth be told, I can barely write with a pen these days, and rarely need to. In the past, literary estates were physical, and if fame had beckoned, could be acquired by American universities. Now, we live digitally, with the measure of our lives held on distant, remote servers.
But what about the archiving of the present for the future? Well, it's happening in Yahoo Mail, Flickr and MySpace. It's also happening in YouTube and on professional rich media content management systems such as telvOS.
So much more of our lives are being caught on video and the gentle rarity of 8mm film has given way to the ubiquity of the video camera phone. In other words, the written word is being gradually replaced by actualite - by the videograms of our lives.
But what about the archiving of the present for the future? Well, it's happening in Yahoo Mail, Flickr and MySpace. It's also happening in YouTube and on professional rich media content management systems such as telvOS.
So much more of our lives are being caught on video and the gentle rarity of 8mm film has given way to the ubiquity of the video camera phone. In other words, the written word is being gradually replaced by actualite - by the videograms of our lives.
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