My local newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel, has launched an ad campaign called The Story of You. Perhaps the story aspect is why I’ve been a newspaper reader since age 7, when I read a certain piece of information about Santa Claus in Dear Abby.

I consider newspaper reading one of the non-negotiable aspects of my busy life and am always amazed that people I really respect are not newspaper readers.

Here’s what the Sentinel said about the Story of You:

For over 100 years, the Orlando Sentinel has been a part of the
Central Florida community. We have seen the best and worst together.
We have been through the ups and the downs, the ins and the outs. Come
see how we are celebrating this very important relationship between
our company and the communities that we serve at OrlandoSentinel.com/storyofyou.
And learn how the most important story we write about is the one you
live, every day.

“I don’t send postcards anymore; I send stories.”

— commercial for MS Windows

Trendwatching.com has a wonderful quote in its Life Caching article, but it’s not atttributed. I’d love to know who said it:

“Human beings (fueled by vanity, by a need to raise their self-worth, by their desire for validation, for control, for immortality) love to collect and store possessions, memories, experiences, in order to create and share personal histories, or just to keep track for practical reasons. And now, thanks to an onslaught of new technologies and tools, from blogging software to memory sticks to high definition camera phones, they can.”

Trendwatching.com devotes many words in its article on Life Caching to capturing stories in photos, reminding me of Martin Kimeldorf and his book, Digital Photo Journal. Kimeldorf says his book “is about interacting with your own pictures in the form of a journaling response and includes the notion of photoblogging for those interested in more public displays.”

Martin keeps a photo blog, just another twist on storytelling.

Will this “ovum drive” solve my problems?

Trendwatching.com talks about services like Google’s Gmail offering massive amounts of free storage and memory sticks that can store up to 1 GB* of content that are being worn on lanyards as a fashion accessory. (*actually, some can store even more).

The week I read the Life Caching article, I had a major computer meltdown. My Mac G4 wouldn’t start up, and I could not access any of my data. I back up my data every few months, but when I had last done it in June, I had problems with the backup, so it ended up being rather spotty.

I had a lovely new storage device that held 4 gigs of data, but I had never gotten around to backing up my data on it. I could have easily saved the most important stuff. But I hadn’t.

Here, I must digress and briefly discuss my obsession with storage devices. I have long been passionate about everything from Tupperware to plastic storage boxes to stackable shelves and baskets to Zip drives. When I walk through the plastic bin aisle in Target or page through a catalog with storage vessels, I feel a palpable longing inside and I verge on hyperventilation. I have a theory that women are attracted to these storage items because they remind us of our wombs. (Yes, I am a complete whacko).

I had even nicknamed my 4-gig storage device my U-drive, as in U for uterus. But I had never impregnated my U-drive with data.

The period of four days before I knew the verdict on my data was agonizing (I say that realizing how stupid it sounds when hurricane victims on the Gulf coast are in real agony and my son during this same period was suffering tremendous pain with pancreatitis).

But I live and die by my computer. I spend hours on it, and I feel as though so many pieces of my life are contained within it — so many of my stories. I was especially scared that I had lost my e-mail files. As Trendwatching points out, “email [is rapidly turning into] the new LIFE CACHING database of choice, for business professionals and consumers alike: consumers increasingly email data to themselves, as their email accounts are always online and email search is getting more efficient and labeling of messages is becoming more sophisticated.” These words totally apply to me. My stories, my research, my contacts, my work are all wrapped up in my e-mail. I have long contended that my 12-year e-mail correspondence with my first cousin/best friend Liz is a form of journaling. (Despite our closeness, we’ve talked on the phone only twice in those dozen years.)

As it happened, a guy who goes by “The Mac Doctor” succeeded in getting my computer going again AND retrieving every last bit of my data. He’s my hero. Of course, the first thing I did after it was fixed was back up my data on my U drive.

All was bliss for about a week — until my U-drive failed, some sort of sinister menopausal metaphor, no doubt. I’ve now ordered a round storage device that holds 5 gigs and looks a little like a donut. I shall call it my O for Ovum and hope to successfully store my stories on it.

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.

Oh, I hate it when blogs seem to be abandoned. The first sign may be when a whole month goes by with only one entry. But, for me August was quite an eventful month. I was offered a full-time teaching position at Stetson University and had very little time to prepare for the current fall semester. My son was hospitalized with his third and worst case of pancreatitis. I had a computer meltdown.

Let the story … and this blog … continue.

I discovered Kairos a while back.

Kairos, like me is interested in exploring intersections. To wit:
“Kairos is a refereed online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. Each issue presents varied perspectives on special topics.”

Some of Kairos’s intersections intersect with my intersections of interest. I could easily get lost here.

The Kairos site further states: “In Kairos, we publish ‘webtexts,’ which are texts authored specifically for publication on the World Wide Web. These webtexts include scholarly examinations of large-scale issues related to special topics, individual and collaborative reviews of books and media, news and announcements of interest, interactive exchanges about previous Kairos publications, and extended interviews with leading scholars.

With Kairos, we seek to push boundaries in academic publishing at the same time we strive to bridge the gap between print and digital publishing cultures. We further seek to bring forward and support the voices of those too often marginalized in the academy, especially graduate students and adjunct and other part-time faculty.”