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The Memory Keeping Landscape, circa 2009
The Memory Keeping Landscape, circa 2009
| The Memory Keeping Landscape, circa 2009 |
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| Blog - JS.Com Articles | |||
| Written by Jessica Sprague | |||
| Thursday, 09 April 2009 19:00 | |||
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When someone comes back, years from now, to try to get a picture of what your life was like, and what your thoughts were, how will that picture look?{...}
Here's a better rephrasing: if you had to look at your memory-keeping or "this is my life" documentation efforts as a pie-chart, what would it look like? What percentage is:
And these are just the more traditional media! What about the recent tools that enable you to capture your story in more immediate ways? Twitter, your blog, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, web galleries, forums, even email are ways we can share snippets in near-realtime. I am part of the last generation that will remember dropping a roll of film off at Wal-mart to be developed, and waiting with anticipation to see which pictures came out. My kids might never even touch a film camera, and will grow up with the internet an integral part of their daily lives (something that the rest of us CLEARLY remember not having, even if we can't now imagine what our life would be like. No Amazon? I shudder.) I'm also part of the first generation of iPhone and other "smartphone" users, who think nothing of snapping a few quick pics or a little video on our way to work or school, and emailing them to Flickr or uploading them to YouTube. How do you think this immediacy, this intimacy affects the more traditional styles and media of memory keeping? Are they totally separate? Is posting a tweet as valid as writing two paragraphs of journaling a scrapbook page? For me, the internet has changed everything about life-telling. Not just in the opportunities it has presented me, but in the connection I feel with so many others. I don't talk about scrapbooking to that many people in real life, outside of events. But I know hundreds of people I would call friends that I may never even meet in real life. I think this is the best part of it. Couple that with the fact that I can dash off a blog post or a tweet or a Facebook post in a few minutes, rather than the 2.5 hours that EACH of the two scrapbook pages I made today took, and having lots of quick storytelling methods begins to make lots of sense. Is there a place for new technology alongside more - shall we say - thoughtful record keeping (let's admit that when you snap a pic on your iphone and email it to Flickr that you aren't really going for professional quality OR for life-changing statements, right)? How have you noticed your own storytelling changing with the advent of life-sharing technologies like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter? Do you think the trend is a good one? So:
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Comments (15)
 
I love new technology. I'm on fire over all things "digi" right now. But I have a big concern about making records permanent. I'm old enough to remember 8-track tapes and even 45's and I dont' want my pictures to go the way of the world. I want my grandkids to be able to look at them. So, I've taken Stacy Jullian's advice and I get hard copies of important pictures and keep them in an album. I get hard copies of all my scrapbook pages. They will be there for my grandkids and I can relax and enjoy the present with digi scrapping, websites and blogs. I can't pick out one specific aspect that is interesting to me above the others. If it says "digi" I'm in!
1
April 11, 2009
I have kept a journal all my life and started scrapbooking half way though it. I LOVE technology and thrive in it and have only started to really utilize what is truly available. Yes I will continue to use all the things you speak of to share in this world of electronics, but I remain avid about putting it in 'Story Books' as I call them. I want the stories to be read in the future by my grand-children and their children so they will know who we were and what we were about and what made us cry and what made us shout with glee. Our lives are too short here with all that we experience and learn and I wish I had the stories of my past generations as I look at the too few pictures left and wonder what they were about.
As for the new technology??? It is too funny when I write my observations or my pride of my children on my 'internet' journal and they read it later and realize how I really felt. Many times it brings us closer and a bond has been created. And for the children and family far away, it serves as an awesome tool to share our lives even though we can't be there all the time. I personally could not live without the technology of today. And lord knows, I could not paper scrap all the stories I need to get out, and digi along with blogging, has sped that process up tremendously. But I will always still love the papers  Still love getting my hands dirty and leaving my 'mark'. But Lord help you if you took my compy away! I'd be lost! Here... take my TV instead.  2
April 11, 2009
I did not even try a computer until I was 40 years old. I grew up in the radio days and TV entered my life in my teens. We kept all of our black and white and eventually colored photographs in photograph albums. We pasted them on a page, fitting as many on that page as possible, no journaling (we were reminded often to put the who and the date on the back of the photo), no embellishments. My children were grown when I was introduced to traditional scrapbooking and I was just awe-struck. I stayed up all night looking through my albums and boxes of photographs and dreaming of the possibilities. I made my first album and was thrilled to watch my daughter develop again from a baby to a young adult. What memories that evoked in me! I now use a computer regularly, do lots of tradition scrapbooking and lots of digital scrapbooking. I have a page on facebook, write a blog and still keep a traditional paper and pen journal. I am curious about twitter. In the long run we can not keep new advancements at bay (why would we want to?)so the best thing to do is embrace them and fit them into our lifestyle and use them to tell our tales. I wish my mother and my grandmother had left more to me than just pages of yellowing photos and no details. ~Ann
3
April 11, 2009
I started this amazing digital adventure because of a broken wrist. Prior to 2004, I had a small computer that could not be updated past Elements 2 and all of my scrapbooks were traditional. I admired Jessica's work and wanted to learn more but after the cast came off my wrist, arthritis set in and for several years I couldn't use my right hand for much at all. This is when I stumbled upon Jessica's website and for my birthday that year my husband bought me a new computer, monitor, camera, and printer. I have taken every class that Jessica has offered since the first Betta one. I use my left hand for the mouse and now I use my right hand for the tablet. I have a whole new wonderful way to preserve all of my memories. I haven't let the fact that I was in my fifties when I started this adventure and am now close to 65, slow me down one bit. I am thrilled by each new idea, each new carefully presented skill and each new way to capture the wonder of my life. The pages and stories that I have been able to record with my digital pages are a continual delight to all of my family and friends and, most importantly to me.
4
April 11, 2009
First off, I'd like to do a big shout out to Ann! Good for you for not letting your age stand in the way of learning new technology. I so love hearing that. [removed]void(0); I'm in my 40's and starting keeping a scrapbook when I was in Jr. high. It was one of those bound black artist's books and I put my photos in along with words and sayings that I clipped out of magazines for titles. I attached everything with rubber cement or good ol' Elmer's glue. I kept that up until I was out of college and then when I got married, I stumbled upon scrapbooking ala Creative Memories but only did a wedding album. When my son was born, I re-entered the world of scrapbooking via a friend and I was hooked big time! I even started a little scrabooking business selling supplies out of my home, but I think I did it more so I could buy the supplies at wholesale [removed]void(0); Meeting Jessica at CKU in Anaheim almost 2 years ago, opened my eyes to digi. And now I'm hooked. [removed]void(0); Every once in a while I'll feel the urge to play with paper and supplies by most of my creations these days are of the digi persuasion. I have yet to start a blog. Mostly I think it's because I don't want one more "thing" that I have to stay on top of. But I toy with the idea regularly and should just jump in and give it a go. I love the idea of the journaling aspect of it as I am not a good diary keeper or journaler. And I think it's a great way to stay in touch with family both near and far. So, as I write this, I think I'm talking myself into starting a blog! What do you know? [removed]void(0); Once again, Jessica, you've impacted my life for the better!
5
April 11, 2009
I have tinkered with online and digital stuff for years, and I used to work in new technology R&D (two of my major projects were cable modem research and video-on-demand, 10 years before either existed!) . . . but here at home, I was sort of like Ann in that I didn't have a good computer. I have a work PC laptop that is fairly new but it's not to be used to anything but work, and I had an old Gateway running Windows ME for 8 years (ouch! and ouch!), and so I only tinkered with digi scrapping, although I did start my blog about a year ago. After years of working on computers and still doing it part time as a technical editor, I didn't want to spend any more minutes in front of one than I absolutely had to! . . . enter iMac. Oh-my-goodness, what a dream. I never in a million years thought I could **love** a computer (let alone my computer). But I do now. Apple has changed my life for the better, as goofy as that sounds.
I use my blog to save stories from my life, and I have always been better at typing than writing, so the journaling flows easier. I get excited about updating it, and since I just recently had my 1-year blogiversary, I started to rethink if my blog was serving the same purpose as when it started and the answer is yes, it's a place to record stories. And now that I am an avid digi scrapper, I cut and paste from my blog all the time. That is really the heart of why I have a blog. I also add pages and pictures and things for others to see, but at its core, my blog is for me, to save my stories, and that certainly has changed the way I record life. Because at the same time, writing also comes easier to me knowing someone out there (at least my mom!) will read my blog and enjoy it. It makes me feel like I am writing to someone and not just recording, which makes it more fun. I'm not on Facebook and don't Twitter or Tweet or Hum or Buzz  . . . and at this point, as many of you know, I am too wordy for short little sentences. But I do think that a list of a week or day's tweets would make a cool page! Just not really my thing so much. This is the first place I've ever really wanted to talk/discuss/post, believe it or not. I tried 2Peas but it's so huge and I felt lost in the crowd. Over here, I love that everyone is a geek. I make paper layouts still and meet with friends IRL to do that. But digi has taken over a huge slice now for me. I started to think about my percentages on that list of ways to record life, and I felt too overwhelmed! I need to sign off and get to work on some photos for my 365 album uploaded as well as some 12x12 LOs that need printing. But I love this post, Jessica, and I will be interested in people's responses. 6
April 12, 2009
My digi journey only started 1 year ago with a dear friend of mine. Both of us are expats travelling the world with our families, moving all to often due to new postings, every 2/3 years or so. We are 5 star hotel hospitality families. I've always wanted to journal our adventures along the way and the old way of scrapbooking for me takes forever, I still have albums left unfinished because of lack of time, it's messy, time consuming and now living where I do, scrapbooking products are non existent, that kills any interest entirely!
Digi scrapbooking is so easy, so fast and if I want to change anything I can do it with a click of the mouse...technology has changed my once patient self to being more impatient (like the attention span of a toddler) and wanting things done in a snap, so I can get onto doing something else that needs doing or just go out there and create more life time moments and learn more. The only time I will ever do traditional paper scrapbooking is with friends, as a get together, learn a new technique and really just to have fun and chit chat. I use facebook as my way of keeping in touch with family and friends all around the world, post photos, layouts, chat, it's simple and easy and I don't have time to blog. I use skype, messenger and gmail to chat to family and friends online. The kids (I have teenagers) use the internet everyday for youtube/facebook/World of War Craft, they frequent cyber cafes often with friends to play games. Today much more school work requires the internet to do assignments, the internet compliments and enhances the learning experience. Gone are the days of looking in an encyclopedia book for an answer. Google.com is one of my most frequented sites to find things! I do in the end want to make a digi scrapbook of our life and our journeys around the world together, with journaling. I've even got the husband on board with this now. He wrote a journal of his experiences during a 5 day scuba diving adventure he went on and he asked me when he returned with over 200 under water photos "darling can you please do a couple of digi scrapbooking pages for me with the photos and my journaling is in my diving log book". Wow, that is a first, the husband putting pen to paper! But a very nice sign he wants to remember the experience and share it, something men don't often do....talk! This digi world has impacted our lives in many ways and computers and the internet are our gateway to the world. My family at least would be lost without them! I would dread the thought of having to hand write a letter to send back home! New technologies and the amount of new jobs created by it that our schools currently do not have a curriculum to cover and educate about them is amazing. How do teachers teach for an ever changing world? 7
April 12, 2009
I must admit. I am somewhat of a traditionalist. I digi because my creative streak can't get enough... and my daughter can't mess up these supplies! I will always love the photo albums of old, however. With some pics that DIDN'T turn out right, to spark the verbal stories of what it was supposed to capture. I come from a family of storytellers, and I hope to keep the tradition no matter what. Unfortunately, a Facebook page will never do the deed for me.
8
April 12, 2009
I love your thoughts here, everyone! It's clear that the scrapbooking and memory-keeping landscape has changed forever because of the Internet, and our experiences here prove it.
9
April 13, 2009
I love the integration of new technology too. It allows me to do things that I otherwise wouldn't have done. When I was younger, I used a journal. Now I blog. I feel like my blogging is an honest representation of who I am on the whole from day to day or week to week. Traditional scrapbooking was a part of my life until I found digital scrapbooking. I plan on finishing those non-digital pictures traditionally, but I love the creativity that scrapbooking digitally allow. I love the fact that I can send a picture from my smartphone to my blog or my facebook. I love the fact that friends and family through media like facebook can comment on my status or pictures or my digiscrapped pages in realtime. So, looking back, people will find some traditional scrapbooking, much digital scrapbooking (printed even), thousands of photos on harddrives, digital scrapbooking on harddrives, and a few journals from my youth.
I'm hoping that I can figure out how to copy my blog and print it - using it as a memoir of my life. 10
April 13, 2009
@Louise: Attention span of a toddler! HA! Me too! Although I don't think I'm bragging so much as commiserating. Look, something shiny!
@Zindra: I love the idea of printing your blog as your life story. It is interesting that we still want those printed, tangible things, isn't it? 11
April 13, 2009
I couldn't agree more with all the comments above. I am an IT Manager and so use a computer all day, every day and would often not want to come home and use it too. I found UK Scrappers in 2007 (yes I am in the UK) as I was making a lot of cards. At the end of 2007 I joined a teams point on there and as you have to scrapbook to earn points, I started "in real life" scrapping by joining a few challenges. One of those was a 365 project by Anna Bowkis. Basically she would give you a daily quote and you had to journal about it and take an appropriate photo. I kept this up all year, made some very excellent and life long friends (over the internet) and have an album of 52 layouts and a daily journal with my all journalling and photos in. This made me start a blog so I could share my photos which now updating on a daily basis is just second nature and is part of my daily routine. I don't really enjoy in real life scrapping as I don't like anything I make and always look at others people work and just think mine looks rubbish in comparison. A couple of my 365 friends do digi all the time and I just didn't get it - until I had a go and now I am hooked! I am doing the Now We're Rockin' class at the moment and I am so blown away by it - I feel like I have joined a cult am and forever preaching to others about how great digi is.
I have a 3 year daughter and scrapbooking is an excellent way to record her life and many of the albums I have made have been about her. Digi has allowed me to make layouts that I am so much happier with. The one thing I haven't done yet is to print any - but they are all backed up to an EHD and all over my blog. My next thought was to put these layouts on to a digital photoframe so that all my visitors can enjoy them without me shoving albums under their noses. Like many of you, not many of my real life friends scrap book so using the net etc is only way that I can share my work and receive comments about my work. The only downside to technology is how time consuming it is. I often turn the pc on and think just 5 minutes and then an hour later I am still sat here trawling round various scrapping sites! Thank god I found this one!!! 12
April 13, 2009
My husband laughs that I am such a tech geek - the idea of my new iMac makes me giddy, my wide format printer was a "reward" for an accomplishment reached, my blog keeps family and friends up to date and provides me a place to record my thoughts, projects, stories, etc. I check Facebook to get updates on those I love and share little glimpses of my day. I love that technology has CONNECTED me to friends I had lost touch with. It has given me the means to get to know my siblings and their children in a way I would never have been able to with so much distance between our homes. I love that my children read my blog over and over to remember the stories, see the pictures, and watch the video clips ... even if they've seen them 20 times already. They do the same thing with the scrapbook pages I have in albums for them. I have met people online that I consider my DEAR friends - many that I have not or may never meet - and yet we share a connection because we know each others stories. With my fondness for all things techy I still have a huge place in my heart for yummy paper, beautiful embellishments, and "real" bling. I still love to create handcrafted gifts for those I care about. I love to combine my two loves into hybrid goodness ... the best of both worlds
13
April 14, 2009
I love the new technology and enjoy digi scrapping much more than working with papers and stickers, but I wonder if generations from now, our decedents will be able to access our blogs, etc.
14
April 22, 2009
My own memory-keeping landscape has reached a point at which it hearkens back to the freewheeling memory-keeping of my youth. I, too, have always kept scrapbooks, though they were really part journal, part photo album, part clippings repository, part art notebook—all in the black-bound unruled notebooks sold as sketchbooks to art students. Eclectic collections of daily thoughts and events, photos, clipped cartoons and articles, halting sketches (I thought myself no artist in those days), bits of verse, original and otherwise, snippets of conversations, quotations, Chiquita banana stickers, and who knows what else. From those early efforts, I eventually found the grownup world of paper scrapping, which held my interest for several years, until I began to feel confined and then “saw the light”—digital scrapbooking. FINALLY I could create without having to drag out all the materials and supplies then packing them up again. I began blogging too.
Fast-forward to 2009, and I have almost come full circle back to my eclectic memory-keeping youth. I’m still digiscrapping, still using the computer and internet as my main scrapping and journaling tools, but I’m now keeping less label-able volumes comprising printed digital pages, paper pages, and hybrid pages, and as in my youth, they are, once again, eclectic collections of daily thoughts and events, photos, clipped cartoons and articles, bits of verse, snippets of conversations, quotations, and even a few less-halting sketches, though the Chiquita banana stickers don’t figure quite so heavily in my layouts as they once did. LOL I’m not as carefree with my books as when I was a teenager, but hey, I don’t have puberty to deal with anymore either! I also think that some technological advances have made scrapbooking (in the 21st century sense) and photography significantly more democratic than they once were. For one thing, digiscrapping requires less investment in terms of space and supplies than paper scrapping. Think about it—one woman, working in a corner of the family room with a laptop computer and a halfway decent printer can produce pages as artistic and captivating as the paper scrapper with the huge, well-appointed and well-stocked scrapping/crafting room. We don’t have to spread our supplies all over the dining room table, then have it all cleaned up in time for supper. We can buy one digital paper and use it in a hundred layouts, if we’re so moved. I love the egalitarian spirit of that. Furthermore, the immediacy of technology has changed our photo-taking habits for the good in some ways. Quite simply, we DO take more pictures because we CAN. In photos of my grandparents and great-grandparents, they almost NEVER smiled. I wondered about this until my grandmother explained that in those days, having a photo taken was a serious business, and pretty expensive at that. Think of the special clothes and planning that goes into a professional photo shoot today—in Nan and Pop’s youth, that’s what EVERY photo shoot was like. So you didn’t smile or laugh or do anything silly on such a solemn occasion as having your photographic portrait made. And in those times before cameras with Image Stabilization or even reasonably fast shutter speeds, you had to stay mighty still, sometimes with your head clamped in position. Even when the early consumer cameras came along, they were not exactly user-friendly and still required a good bit of care to produce a decent image. The result was that fewer pictures were taken, definitely fewer good images were produced, and ordinary, everyday life was far less well-documented than it is now. How many people do you know who lament their dearth of family heritage photos? Laziness and carelessness probably had nothing to do with it; expense and relative inaccessibility probably did. So, thinking of the state of the art in the early 21st century as compared to that in the early 20th century, I love that now we CAN create the quick snaps or videos, just because we see something that makes us go “Ooh!” whether it’s the kids being adorable or quirky or a patch of wildflowers blooming unexpectedly, or a fabulously tasteless house being built on our route to work (yes, I’ve stopped and photographed just such a house). Ah, democracy—it’s everywhere! 15
April 25, 2009
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I have been thinking a lot lately about what constitutes scrapbooking. Or, more generally, what constitutes memory keeping? With all the cool tools and technology that are becoming available - everything from blogging to Facebook, to Twitter, to YouTube, to your digital video library living alongside the journal on your nightstand and your traditional scrapbook albums - the places we tell our stories are becoming vastly more varied.
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