I saved up my visual history in 3/4 inch, VHS, slides, prints, CDs, hard-drive, flashdrive and cloud.
Not so much for me, but for my daughters .
That collage documented my fits and starts.
Each person is a narrative whose ending remains a mystery ( ‘in my end, is my beginning”).
In the Year of Magical Thinking, the widow-writer kept wishing that her husband would return (hence, magical ),
and refused to give his stuffs away.
The hard part about closure is to get through denial.
We have come a long way, since Watergate (White House secret taping) to Wikileaks.
The best way to avoid having some thing bad traced back to you is not to leave one in the first place.
What is whispered shall be announced from the roof top.
I blogged about de-clutterization. But this time, it’s not about our hoarding habit (fax machine?).
It’s about using whatever format or latest update (Adobe) as tool and transparency as policy.
Companies spent enormous amount of time, energy and money to whip up great-looking “About us”.
Until prospective customers detected incongruity and inconsistency (reputational lag).
We live our digital lives one day at a time in open-source mode, with myriads of combinations to collaborate and co-create (the sharing economy). We will have to relearn TRUST as online currency before Web 3.0 can happen (co-create).
The twin brother-in-law of Congress woman Giffords said on CBS: “from space, I saw this beautiful planet and I wouldn’t guess there were so much – bad things such as random shooting – going on . We can do better “.
Out in open space, with no one watching, one presumes, like Nixon, that misspoken words are not coming back to haunt.
But in cyberspace, the opposite is true. We do live our virtual lives with more-real-than-real-life ramifications. We leave behind our digital fingerprints and carbon footprints, together form a narrative, to be mined years from now by “bots”. Faint-of-hearts need not apply! (as of this edit, Apple just purchased a company whose software can pinpoint where we have been i.e. GPS plus past footprints to predict our next likely frequent stops).
Thang Nguyen 555 