Preserving story.

When you graduate high school, people talk about leaving a legacy. What kind of legacy, I was never sure. Yet it’s true; when we leave, part of us stays behind.

In Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary the narrator says, “We’re all of us immortal. We couldn’t die if we wanted to.” The novel is about how we create our stories in every action, and how this is inescapable. It’s about how even after we die we remain alive in everything we did. And about how we can’t fully die because we’ve left a mark.

Jonathan Harris is giving us the chance to leave our collective mark in the form of a digital time capsule. His Yahoo! Time Capsule, open now, is accepting contributions through November 8, and already includes a vast amount of viewable content. People contribute from all over the world, hoping to capture the story of 2006, and preserve it for future generations.

Generations have being leaving time capsules for a long while. Let’s see, did we bury ours in middle school or elementary? Faulty memory—another reason we need records; another reason to keep a diary. I remember: each student brought an item—the item he thought represented him well—and dumped it into a big, black trash bag. Then we put it in the ground and covered it with dirt. Years later, we dug it up.

Looking back is more than nostalgic. It lets us see who we were and gives us a clue as to who we are.

Today, it’s different. Today we have technology. Harris’s proposal: “You’ll be part of history and witness what others are saying and saving. You’ll have your handiwork presented to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, projected on one of the most famous relics on the planet, AND then beamed along a path of laser light into space.”

How exciting: Each of us has the chance to contribute our story in any form: image, sound, writing, podcast, URL. But what’s really exciting is, we can contribute to the collective story. The story we are telling together, the story that evolves with each individual. If something, a photograph or quote or whatever, represents you, it represents someone else, too, and it should be shared.

I have a few items in mind I’d like to share. And while this isn’t the legacy they talked about in high school, this legacy is far more important. This legacy is much closer to the possibilty of leaving something that will actually matter and connect with someone else.

Tell every story.

We tell each other stories to relate. Much of the time, though, we think we can’t.

Do we all have basically the same experiences? No. That can’t be. Or could it? Do the same thoughts rotate through each of our heads? It’s cool to think the answer could be yes. But we don’t act the same.

What about multiple realities? If we all have the same experiences and we all think the same thoughts, then are we the same person, living out the same story in different realities? A reality, here, will be defined as perspective: My perspective is one reality; your’s another.

Obviously, I don’t have the story, our story, figured out. I lack. And you lack. But in some strange alignment, we lack different pieces. When pieces start to come together, as they always do in ways I could never imagine, it feels like we are getting somewhere. Finally, some information is revealed.

Yes, information is usually revealed slowly, but it should be. At a basic level, this keeps the audience interested. On a deeper level, information is hard to digest. We can only take so much at any given time. We need time to process things, especially when new information contradicts previous information.

The story progresses and we evolve even at the most superfical levels of processing new information. As long as new, revealed clues find their way to our minds, we can examine them. Examining never means automatic acceptance, it simply means we are open to moving the story forward.

Wilcot & his trouble with symbols.

How we view our world is based largely on how we understand those symbols which surround us.

Take a fictional character, Wilcot, for example. Wilcot is new to his world. Most people in his world wear clothing. But Wilcot does not know what it means for someone to weave fabric together into what his neighbor, Samantha, calls the latest fashion trend. Sometimes, Samantha walks to her car in blue jeans. Wilcot knows what blue is because where he came from the only edible food appeared blue once cooked. The concept of jeans, though, is foreign to poor Wilcot. Samantha has suggested jeans to Wilcot, and he has tried them, but they fit too tightly for his liking. Other times, when Samantha goes out after dark, Wilcot notices her wearing fabrics even more closely and tightly fitted to her legs than jeans. This time, the fabrics stop some inches above her ankles. Wilcot once asked, “Should I try those, too?” She only laughed because she thought him to be joking. A day later, Wilcot walked to his mailbox wearing nothing but leggings. Poor Wilcot.

I’m not sure how long Wilcot will last without being mocked until he figures out exaclty the style of clothing he is supposed to wear. If he only has Samantha as a reference to the clothing people wear, he may not be getting information that will suit him best. Wilcot’s concept of clothing is certainly expanding each time he sees Samantha wearing something different. And because of this he will be able to share with her what jeans and leggings are; what they look like; and the name Samantha attributed to each.

But is he sharing the correct information?

If we were able to share only a limited amount of information, that is, if we could shape our world with only that information garnered and shared between a small group of people, what information would we choose to store in our memories, and what would we choose to discard?