Social Archivist

I was intrigued to read about a new “social legacy network” called MyHeartWill.com which enables you to create, share and store digital memories in a “safe, private and secure environment that will live on for generations to come”.

“By using the internet as a storage space for these memories, they can never be lost or damaged.”

No form of archiving is completely safe but I do wonder how permanent anything stored online or even something digital can be? Is it truly more permanent than in printed form? How do I know if this service will be around in 100 years? Will Facebook? Will Twitter? How many floppy disks or computers are out there with data that can’t (easily) be read?

My other main concern with these types of sites (and more are popping up all the time) is that it is yet another regular discipline that we need to add to our already busy lives.

“People have a genuine desire to capture their lives. Other on-line platforms already exist that serve part of this function, but they’re frenzied, they’re fast, extremely public and by nature, pretty superficial. Here is a conscience-driven, thoughtful, evocative web-based tool that takes social marketing to a much deeper level.”

Maybe. You can already set up your Facebook, Twitter, blogs to be completely private if you so wish. There’s plenty of people blogging at a deep level about their lives so I wonder what this new tool offers that, say, opening a free account on Wordpress.com doesn’t:

• MyHeartWill costs $199US for 10 years and 2GB of storage for text, photos, videos and audio
• Wordpress is free and gives you 3GB of storage for text, photos, videos and audio and it can be as private as you want it to be

Those behind the site says that Facebook, Twitter and blogs etc are lacking when it comes to sharing the stories and content that comprise a person’s life, that they’re too hurried. In some sense I agree – most of the updates we do in Twitter or Facebook are very quick but those writing personal blogs or writing long notes on Facebook about events in their lives would likely disagree. The problem is that we don’t write long accounts of the stories and memories that we want to because we just don’t have time, not because we don’t have the tools available to us.

The issue is how to permanently store the things we’re already writing, sharing, talking about – and of course with the option of appending other content with it. Maybe the deeper stories will sometimes need to be added to fill in the gaps, but the day-to-day observations and comments really give you a thorough insight into someone’s life.

While writing this, I think of the blog Kyah’s Journey – one which documented the life of a beautiful little girl’s brave fight with cancer. The in-depth, personal and deeply moving blog is currently being converted into a book.

A truly ground-breaking tool is not another site to store our content but one which meaningfully combines our already-existing digital trails for future generations to enjoy.

I came across a series of articles about how people lined up for a souvenir copy of a newspaper when Obama became president. Here’s some interesting quotes from them:

“How do you memorialize an exuberant comments thread on a blog post or a series of ecstatic Facebook status updates when those pages could move or disappear? …how do you make something permanent in a medium built on constant change? For me, the only answer to come to mind is “print out and frame a screen capture.” What about you? How do you extract a memento from the online world? Rob Pegoraro

“You can’t put a computer screen into a scrapbook” Joyce Mutcherson-Ridley

“You can’t show your children your BlackBerry or your computer screen. In 30 years, my children will be able to touch and feel these papers when I tell them all about this historic day.” Merwyn Scott

Lots of people out there are pondering this issue of taking digital memories and preserving them in a physical form.

An alternate way to archive all your old Facebook activity is this new Firefox extension: Archive Facebook. Basically what it does is save you the hassle of going to your profile page, scrolling to the bottom and clicking “Older posts” over and over again until you get right back to when you first joined Facebook (and yes, I have done this in the past!).

From that, you could either just print it or convert this massive webpage into a PDF file and then print that. It’s not the most user-friendly of extensions as you need to leave your browser to do all the archiving and can’t browse the net at the same time as it’s doing the archiving but it is another way of getting a record of your Facebook wall posts, status updates, photos (albeit thumbnails), comments and the like.

I tested this and just archived the last six months of my Facebook page and ended up with a 74 (!) page PDF. A special print stylesheet would make this much more suitable for printing and greatly reduce the number of pages required.