Down through the ages people have kept journals, diaries, daybooks and other forms of written and keepsake records of their lives. Some have been written in elegant leather-bound volumes in permanent ink, some have been written in pencil on school lined tablets, some on bits and pieces of anything and everything and stuffed in shoe boxes. Writing a journal usually seems unimportant on the day we are writing it because the events and people we are writing about are so close to us and so ordinary in our lives that these written comments hardly seem exceptional. Time, however, endows anything written in the past with a nostalgic patina and glow that erases the ordinary everyday character of today's journal entries. The most valuable legacy people can leave to their descendants is a legacy of journals, letters, and photographs.
Today we are at risk of losing much of our historical heritage. Fewer and fewer handwritten letters are being sent. The ubiquitous cell phone and computer email have replaced the bundles of neatly tied letters kept in old cedar chests for posterity. Text messaging, online social websites, and group emailing may have made communication instant and efficient, but have destroyed the historical treasure of paper messages. I try to keep a file of email letters, but these homogeneous and impersonal messages hardly evoke the same reactions when I read them as letters my parents wrote to each other in the 1930s with their three-cent postage stamps and memorable messages. Now our messages vanish into cyberspace. People are so used to not writing letters that even the social grace of writing thank you notes seems to have vanished with increased busyness and the lack of focus on keeping in touch.
Technology and modern communication outlets do, however, offer some tremendously innovative methods of providing substitutions for the bygone letter-writing eras, and even go a few additional steps in providing enriched forms of journals and records of our families and of our lives. Traditionally, journals were written by an individual and then perhaps, but not necessarily, read over in whole or in part when someone died. Photos were stuffed in shoe boxes and slide trays and buried in attics and closets and retrieved again upon someone's death. Thus, the values and benefits that could have been widely disseminated during the journal keeper's life, along with the photographic record of that life, were lost until someone died. And then, only if someone took the time to organize the journals, reproduce them, and scan and make available thousands of photos and slides, would anyone else ever have the opportunity to look at them and develop a deeper attachment to and appreciation of someone's life.
The opportunity to keep photo journals on computers, with both written and photo entries, and to post these journals on websites, blogs, and other media forms, is a rather miraculous means of providing instant dissemination of information to families, friends, and others who otherwise may never have seen these photos and written entries. Photo journaling provides a means of keeping families closely in touch, sharing news and events, and strengthening family ties. When we think of journaling, we traditionally think of someone with a quill pen and a bound leather volume laboriously penning immortal thoughts never to be revealed in one's lifetime. The possibility of adding photos, however, offers tremendous new and expanded outlets for providing life stories as a collection of daily journal entries. Just as written accounts of our lives provide a window into our inner selves, photos provide an additional window into an approximation of what reality is like. Photos, of course, always carry an aura of mystery because we are never sure exactly what the people and places represent, just as we are never certain about what people have meant when they write certain words. But taken together, photos and words tie us both to the present and to the passage of time in ways that we can only begin to appreciate in the here and now. The ability to disseminate these photo-journal entries to the entire audience of our families means that these word and picture images will never be lost, because someone, or many people, will preserve permanent copies both through printing and storage on electronic media.
So we may shed a tear or two at the letters we no longer receive, but we can smile as we begin to take advantage of the wonderful opportunities we have to provide a more valuable and permanent method of communication than transitory emails and cell phone messages. Time passes quickly, so now is the time to start.
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