Technology’s Good Side

For the most part (my apologies to indigenous tribes of the Amazon that may have happened upon my blog), we are a Wired World. There’s an amusing video circulating these days showing Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric struggling with the beginnings of the Internet Age in 1994, and it only serves to illustrate how far this medium has come in the lifetime of a high school senior.

There are obvious goods and bads that have come with websites, cell phones, YouTube, Facebook, and even WordPress. There has been interesting conversation recently about the need to “unplug” and slow our lives down, removing ourselves from the technological trap that we sometimes find ourselves in. This article is particularly interesting to read as an example of some of the fears around losing our “personal histories” to the fast pace of the Internet.

Fortunately, this same technology gives us ways to keep track of our happenings more easily than ever… provided we’ve already bought into the Internet and use it as the standard canvas to draw our lives onto. A great example of this “good side” of technology is a new site (hey, at least to me) — Memolane.

Memolane allows me to track my uploaded Picasa images, Facebook status posts, Twitter “tweets,” or any other information I’ve shared from a number of different platforms and sources. It’s very easy – I just had to log into each platform I wanted to track, and Memolane handled the rest! The result is a fancy little timeline showing my online activity over the past several years. I quickly and enjoyably traveled through my proposal, marriage, and the birth of our first child (not to mention her first bite from our dog, and said dog’s subsequent expulsion to her “grandma” in California). See below for a screen shot of the way Memolane shows my online activity in an easy-to-follow interface. (And if you’re ever in the greater Portland area, DO check out Nonna Emilia’s — see picture below of our leftovers — for some great Italian food with generous portions)

Now — to a few of the drawbacks that I’m sure the smart people at Memolane are working on:

• I admit, I impulsively added myself to this system because I love the idea… not sure how secure my online identity is on this third-party site that stores all of my information from several key accounts. The fact that my wife’s Facebook account was recently hacked, and the hacker angrily demanded that her friends send “her” money to a UK resort where she was stranded, doesn’t put me in a great frame of mind about passing along my passwords to more websites (and yet, I continue to do so — so I either don’t care that much or I trust these sites more than I thought)
• While my Facebook status updates are listed, I can’t see the comments from others on top of my updates… and often THIS is where the really great stuff happens that I’ll want to remember for many years
• The system, while great, didn’t capture all of my Facebook updates over the past 4 years — not sure why some of them are missing, but it’s unfortunate that those omissions include the Facebook post actually announcing our daughter’s birth(!); it appears the kinks are still being worked out on this
• Although having this timeline is great, it’s still really an incomplete picture of my past 4 years (although a great place to start)

Of course, the biggest hole in sites like Memolane (and it’s not anything they can do anything about really), is that most people older than 30 have most of their histories stored offline — in boxes in their garage, in bookshelves or in their parents’ basement (hopefully they’re not still living there). And that unfortunate fact is the reason for my quest this year of documenting the first 30 years of my life that remains silently “offline” and undigitized, doing nobody any good — particularly if something happens to all those physical memories. More to come on that!

In summary, I think Memolane is great and I hope they can help us fill in the gaps of personal history where letters, Polaroids and tape cassettes no longer dare to tread.

What do you think of using some of these online tools to record your personal history? Do the benefits and simplicity outweigh any of your concerns about privacy or permanence?