What’s real?

A couple of days ago, I was having dinner at my parents house with out-of-town family members who were visiting. While we were there, my mother showed us a daily ledger book which my grandfather kept when he owned a Chicago-area Texaco service station.

The ledger was a large soft-bound book which covered most of the year 1950. It had daily records of expenses, charges and sales. It was an amazing experience to have a physical artifact from my family’s history, to read and interact with the ledger. It had my grandfather’s writing in pencil on nearly every page, and most pages were smudged with motor oil and other car substances. Being able to see not only each day’s financial activity, but seeing a small amount of the station’s minutia recorded in the writing, the smudges and the wrinkles in the page was wonderful and emotional.

Contrast that to a spreadsheet or an accounting program which would be used today. The data is there, but there’s none of the context, the reality of handwriting and motor oil, the texture of the paper, the smell of old book.

So what is real? Are all the tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts and Yelp reviews we create real? Maybe we can archive them and pass them down to our children and grandchildren, but all that’s there are fleeting thoughts and commentary, given context only by the moment in which they’re created.

I suppose we’ve become very good at capturing instants. The ubiquity of connectivity and social media have made it very easy to record and share our momentary thoughts. But we can’t capture all of the other details which a physical artifact convey. What will I hand down to my children and grandchildren? I have no ledger book, not even a journal with my own handwriting for my descendants to hold, touch and experience.

I must create something which my child can one day hold in their hands and say, “My dad made this.”

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http://www.facebook.com/johnetynan John Tynan

Matthew, an interesting question. I've written a reply here: http://johntynan.com/?p=688
http://www.noahdyer.com Noah

Time for the Petro Time Capsule!

I used to keep physical journals. It's embarrassing to go back and read them (haven't done so in a couple years), but it's an idea.

Or maybe you could become a famed scrap booker. Scrap booking needs a man champ.
http://www.yuriartibise.com Yuri Artibise

Matthew, though they are done 'in cyberspace' our online musings convey very real opinions and ideas. If you want something to hand down to @PetroKid, why not print out a selection of your favorite posts each month and archive them along with some of your pictures, tweeter streams, yelp reviews, etc into a scrapbook type album (minus the die cut kittens and heart shape cut-outs .)

This way, you'll have something special to share with your child as s/he ages. After all, there is nothing more special to a growing kid than a peak inside a parent's mind at a particular point in time
Pingback: My Mom’s Christmas Ledger
http://matthewpetro.wordpress.com Matthew Petro

Actually, my wife is the scrapbooker in our house. She's made some really nice ones…she even made a two-volume set of her grandmother's life and gave it to her as a Christmas present a few years ago. Her grandmother was absolutely thrilled to have it!

She's also done scrapbooks of years in our life together, so I'm glad our child will have those to look at many years from now.

I like the idea of a physical journal. There's something very palpable about holding a book with actual handwriting in it.
http://matthewpetro.wordpress.com Matthew Petro

I think that putting together a selection of online communications is a cool idea, and it definitely creates something “real”. But there's still something more tangible about a handwritten artifact. You get all the nuance of the person who wrote it: the peculiarities of their handwriting, the erasures, smudges and creases. It's like you connect more with them by seeing how they interacted with the page, rather than just reading how their mind interacted with their situation at a specific moment.
http://www.yuriartibise.com Yuri Artibise

True. i guess it's never too late to start a journal.
http://chris.ly/ Chris Lee

You never know. Maybe someday future generations will look at your blog and say how quaint. Look, he actually typed these words, manually put pictures in & themed this himself. I do get you though. I love the family artifacts – journals, furniture, pictures, everything…
http://matthewpetro.wordpress.com Matthew Petro

Future generations will have brain implants, so they can just think about stuff and create blog posts, tweets, etc and that will make typing look antique and retro-cool.
http://johntynan.com johntynan

I've been thinking about this further, and while this stirs up both desires for tactile, artistic expression along with data portability questions… I realize too that it is possible to merge the digital with the tactile… perhaps gluing tweets/blog posts into a journal, or even sketching the digital experience as an artistic response (like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johntynan/4603614501/ ).
http://matthewpetro.wordpress.com Matthew Petro

This sounds like a good merger. We don't use tactile items near as much as my grandparents generation did, so it's interesting to record the digital things we do use by putting pen to paper. Even with my limited artistic skills, I think I could do that!
http://wesnovack.com/ WesleyTech

I definitely sometimes get the urge to produce a corporeal item, even if it's just printing a photograph, as the majority of the content that I create is entirely digital. It's definitely nice to hold a physical, one of a kind object in your hands, that cannot be wholly reproduced in entirety by any digital means.
http://wesnovack.com/ WesleyTech

I definitely sometimes get the urge to produce a corporeal item, even if it's just printing a photograph, as the majority of the content that I create is entirely digital. It's definitely nice to hold a physical, one of a kind object in your hands, that cannot be wholly reproduced in entirety by any digital means.