Caching Life

I read a cool blog at http://www.christianlindholm.com/. Christian Lindholm is vice president of global mobile products for Yahoo and before that he was the software creator of Nokia’s Lifeblog, a multimedia journal. What I found interesting was his admission that after 14 years of electronic notetaking he has gone retro and started using Moleskin notebooks.

Pardon the pun, but on that note, multimedia journals are all about a trend called “life caching,” which is basically digital scrapbooking, whereby people mine the detritus of their lives in order to document them for posterity’s sake and to be able to relive them at a later time.

An example of life caching is the use of portable flash drives, or memory sticks as they are sometimes called, which serve as digital “life files,” capturing and preserving moments as memories. Interestingly, it has been suggested that sharing an experience may become as valuable if not more valuable than the actual experience itself.

Reinier Evers, founder of www.trendwatching.com, identified the trend of life caching and has this to say about 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.”