Day: July 14, 2009

Hannah Miller’s blog post, which I discussed in my previous post, also points to another way in which the urge to document our lives might be problematic, one that I actually was writing about over the weekend. To get to my point quickly, let me reference a great New Yorker cartoon. A woman is addressing the guests at what is evidently a fairly fancy party. She says, “The video of the first half of the party is now playing in the family room.” The apprehension to which this cartoon points, and that I see in Hannah’s post is this: the urge to document our lives, indeed the urge to reflect on our lives, can be a way to escape from living our lives. (I certainly see, though, why Hannah is writing about it at a family event. The urge to reflect is likely to come forward when one is hanging… Continue reading

My friend Hannah Miller has written a fascinating blog post that got me thinking in a little different way about some issues that I’ve been working on for a book I’m slowly finishing. Indeed, I had a two-fold reaction. This is the first. A second is in another post. Hannah starts by asking why we are so busy documenting our lives, implicitly pointing out how so much of what we do on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Picassa, among other sites, is devoted to putting down a record of what’s happened to us and what we care about. She ends by pointing out that geologists whose focus is on deep time—the changes in the planet that take place over eons–both recognize the extent to which our lives are a mere blip in time but also get a sense of connection to eternity. To see the wonderful way she gets from the… Continue reading