I have been dying to blog about this phenomenon ever since Jennifer Warwick turned me on to it in mid-August.

According to Trendwatching.com, "collecting, storing and displaying experiences is ready for its big moment. Trendwatching "has dubbed this emerging mega trend 'LIFE CACHING': collecting, storing and displaying one's entire life, for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse."

Trendwatching is especially fascinated with the gadgets that enable us to capture and store our stories, technologies from "blogging software to memory sticks to high definition camera phones with lots of storage space and other 'life capturing and storing devices,' resulting in "an almost biblical flood of 'personal content' ... being collected, and waiting to be stored to allow for ongoing trips down memory lane."

"At LIFE CACHING's core," the site declares, is the need to collect experiences, which ideally convert into stories, which in return enable human beings to engage others: whether it's to please or to convince or to gain status. Oh, and let's not forget that in our individualized, 'everyone counts' society, ALL consumers have a story. This in addition to the more prosaic usefulness of easy access to one's digital assets."

Despite Trendwatching's interest in storying gadgets, if you will, I'm not fond of its reference to people as "consumers." I prefer to think: "in our individualized, 'everyone counts' society, every person has a story." I remain convinced, as I have written numerous times, that 9-11 was a major contributing factor to our "everyone counts" mentality. When 3,000 lives are lost in a day, you realize that each life is precious but can be unexpectedly snuffed out in an instant. You want your story to be told before it is too late.

And as I write less than a week after Hurricane Katrina, I think of the thousands of tragic stories of tremendous suffering of people in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. Everyone counts, but this tragedy provokes us to ask if some people count more than others. I want the victims' suffering to end, and I want their stories to be told so no one ever has to experience such anguish in the wake of a natural disaster.