How to save your life

Human beings are collectors, in part, because our collections tell stories about ourselves. It will come as no surprise then, to learn that Helen Barrett begins her e-Portfolio workshops by asking her participants to reflect on their collection experience.

Technology now allows us to not only collect the tangible, but to collect the intangible too—to record our life experiences. What Trendwatching.com's Reinier Evers calls “life caching:”

…collecting, storing and displaying one's entire life, for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse.

Googling "life caching" unearthed this Robin Good article which includes insightful quotes from Terry Heaton who, in this blog posting, interrogates life caching from a postmodern perspective:

Postmoderns (Pomos) reject hierarchical Modernism and its institutions, especially those where authority is granted based on knowledge. They don't trust institutional "experts," because they sense an ulterior motive—the furtherance of the institution. And so Pomos rely on their own experiences or those of their "tribe" members, people they trust based on shared beliefs and experiences.

Anticipating the power of aggregating these life caches, Heaton continues:

Life caching enables the documentation and storage of those experiences, which, I believe, will one day lead to the development of an enormous, experience knowledge base. Experience, as the old saying goes, is the best teacher, and imagine the value of, for example, a health database, where you could search the experiences of anybody who had your malady.

Finally Heaton draws a parallel between the function of television news and life caching:

For those of us in the TV news business, life caching has significant ramifications, for isn't that exactly what we do? Our life cache is that of communities, and perhaps there are business models that could be developed to augment viewers' own life caching.

BBC Wales has just that business model. Capture Wales empowers people to tell their own digital story, a selection of those stories are then screened on television.