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Wow, perhaps I’m an exception to the norm, but this isn’t my experience at all. My family regularly sends interesting historical records of the lives of our anc

Wow, perhaps I’m an exception to the norm, but this isn’t my experience at all. My family regularly sends interesting historical records of the lives of our ancestors. My great aunt composed a historical record of my great grandfather, who over his life built dozens of houses by his own hand. Even at university, I read a number of interesting historical letters and documents of the people who lived in the same dormitories in generations past. I guess I may be ignoring all those documents that weren’t interesting enough to be remembered, but I imagine it’s hard to predict what will be interesting in the future. The fact that 99% of our lives are stored in computers vs paper would still vastly reduce the number of _interesting_ documents.

buran77 3y ago
The key difference may be in the volume. Old pictures are more important to a family because there are so few of them. I only have one picture of my grandfather because it was taken when cameras were rarer than hen's teeth and 35mm film hadn't been invented yet. Now we have hundreds of thousands of pictures between the family members. Every vacation, every meal, every unimportant moment in time. I don't have time to look at my own pictures and I don't expect anyone else ever will. Digital assets are a lot more perishable that physical ones. Cloud accounts will expire and be purged before anyone has the chance to retrieve them. Nobody will do "storage wars" with your pictures. Your local storage will fail or become incompatible with future tech before anyone has a chance to care about it. We generate information at an ever increasing rate so whatever digital collections we have now will probably never be "dug up" by our descendants for a deeper look. I'm trying to leave a "curated" collection with a few memories in such a way that it's immediately available to my family after I'm no longer around. Some moments in time that were important to my life, and had an influence on theirs.
- Noumenon72 3y ago
  Leave everything and let LLMs curate it on demand. "Show me pictures of my grandpa during the 2020 pandemic." "Show me pictures of my grandma's hobbies." "Find the most interesting pictures in this folder, not interesting historically but interesting action or visuals." "Make a montage of my cousins growing up." "Change my wallpaper every day to the most interesting family photo from that day of the year."
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Great aunt, great grandfather — that's more than one generation back. I think it does get interesting when the distance in time increases. Lets hope our kids and theirs keep our digital archives long enough for the great grandkid's to enjoy.
CalRobert 3y ago
Fpr what it's worth my grandfather recorded his memoirs recently and I am very grateful. He's led a very interesting life (much more so than my own!) which is the key component, really.
- jlarocco 3y ago
  Memoirs are one thing, but archives of mundane daily business? No thanks.
_whiteCaps_ 3y ago
I agree with you. Right now I'm going through my grandfather's squadron records. Hoping to find the day that he crashed his motorcycle in Normandy to see what the CO thought about that. Apparently the other pilots were unhappy with him because they were banned from riding motorcycles after that.

buran77 3y ago

The key difference may be in the volume. Old pictures are more important to a family because there are so few of them. I only have one picture of my grandfather because it was taken when cameras were rarer than hen's teeth and 35mm film hadn't been invented yet. Now we have hundreds of thousands of pictures between the family members. Every vacation, every meal, every unimportant moment in time. I don't have time to look at my own pictures and I don't expect anyone else ever will. Digital assets are a lot more perishable that physical ones. Cloud accounts will expire and be purged before anyone has the chance to retrieve them. Nobody will do "storage wars" with your pictures. Your local storage will fail or become incompatible with future tech before anyone has a chance to care about it. We generate information at an ever increasing rate so whatever digital collections we have now will probably never be "dug up" by our descendants for a deeper look. I'm trying to leave a "curated" collection with a few memories in such a way that it's immediately available to my family after I'm no longer around. Some moments in time that were important to my life, and had an influence on theirs.

Noumenon72 3y ago
Leave everything and let LLMs curate it on demand. "Show me pictures of my grandpa during the 2020 pandemic." "Show me pictures of my grandma's hobbies." "Find the most interesting pictures in this folder, not interesting historically but interesting action or visuals." "Make a montage of my cousins growing up." "Change my wallpaper every day to the most interesting family photo from that day of the year."

JKCalhoun 3y ago

Great aunt, great grandfather — that's more than one generation back. I think it does get interesting when the distance in time increases. Lets hope our kids and theirs keep our digital archives long enough for the great grandkid's to enjoy.

CalRobert 3y ago

Fpr what it's worth my grandfather recorded his memoirs recently and I am very grateful. He's led a very interesting life (much more so than my own!) which is the key component, really.

jlarocco 3y ago
Memoirs are one thing, but archives of mundane daily business? No thanks.

_whiteCaps_ 3y ago

I agree with you. Right now I'm going through my grandfather's squadron records. Hoping to find the day that he crashed his motorcycle in Normandy to see what the CO thought about that. Apparently the other pilots were unhappy with him because they were banned from riding motorcycles after that.