Selfie in 14th century hoodie in the brilliant Museum of London

‘Wait,what?’ I get that too often from my teenagers. I like the idea of studying the phenomenon of the micro-blog, the quasi-aggregation of the moments that matter, but would say that far from diminishing the opportunity to reflect it increases it, not just for you, but amongst family, friends and acquaintances – now we have this rich record artificially recorded forever. Courtesy of the Web we have all become diarists. It is so easy to snap, upload, store and share that we do it continually. It has yet to become a lifelog, but as someone who kept a diary for over 20 years these images are just as capable of acting as a catalyst to recalling and reflecting on what we were doing, who we were with and what we think and feel about it. We can, and do, to varying degrees add comment in social networks, picture galleries and blogs. Should anyone, but lets take an academic, have hundreds of thousands of images of their life and career how much richer the reading experience when it comes to studying their contribution courtesy of these images. It rather pressumes that someone is going to edit the stuff. A shared, collaborative effort in Web 2.0.

Thoughts inspired by an article in the New York Times shared on Facebook