old is the new new

Just read a fantastic article by Jonathan Franzen about his experience with his father's alzheimer's disease and death:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?010910fa_FACT1

Its long, and probably won't interest you unless you're thinking about a parent's possible demise. But if you are dealing with that, then it may help you in some way.

There's a bit where talks about how he remembers his father. He contrasts memories through letters his mom and dad wrote to his personal memories of his father. And then he riffs about how we remember things:

"The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies".

He goes on to speculate about the "postmodern resurgence of the oral and the eclipse of the written: our incessant telephoning, our ephemeral emailing..."

I'd say that emailing, and blogging, isn't that ephemeral after all. So maybe the written, searchable, (semi) permanent communication culture is back in a bigger way than ever. In the event of a blogger's death or alzheimers, their blog gains value. Memories fade and distort. I think as the blogging generation gets older, we'll start to realize the impact of this new imprint we leave behind. Its the next in a long line of technologies used to try to conquer the horrid emptiness left by death of a loved one. The first thing people used photos for were portraits which they held on to after the person died. Then sound, then video. Maybe its this increasingly giant sea of permanent records of people's lives that has our hip culture stuck in retro mode. With every sample of an Isley Brothers song, with every remake of a movie, our environment is made up of clothes/sounds/lives past.

But we don't consider this healthy, do we? We have pictures and old letters from loved ones who died, or maybe we broke up with someone years ago. People go to the trouble of destroying these reminders so as not to be tempted by them. I'm fine with remeniscing over old photos, but when I watch video of people who are gone, well, it just feels wrong. We can conjure their presence, but generally we choose not to, probably b/c once you start down that road, living in old photos, home movies, old blog entries, maybe it'll be hard to turn back to the absence, the uncertain.

I think IM culture was really the triumph of written culture. When people copy chat transcripts and save them (as I've seen in a few blogs), then we are setting in stone so many interactions. You may ignore your old chat transcripts, old photos, old videos, choosing not to live in the past. But maybe me or one of my dorky friends will take it, sample it, give it a new context and new life as a birthday gift or art. In these ways, we are decreasingly mortal.