I recently started keeping a journal again, it helps me to think through the things that are on my mind. I thought about purchasing a nice leather journal to write in. The idea of having something physical that would hopefully outlive me is interesting to me. It’s funny because data has the potential to be stored forever, whereas notebooks will eventually disintegrate; and yet notebooks still seem more permanent to me.
As we go through life we amass all of this knowledge and experience that make up who we are. Before computers these things could only be written down in journals or captured in photographs and yet now all of these things exist in digital form. Stored away on some server somewhere. What happens to all this data when we’re gone?
For my generation almost our whole lives have been catalogued in some sort of digital form. Maybe this is how we pass on the knowledge that we amass to others. Then again there’s so much data now that you have to pose the question as to whether it would even be useful.