1000Memories: A Loved One Has Passed Away. What’s Your Digital Strategy?
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
We are a relational by nature as human beings and this means that connections fade with time. Young people by nature tend not to care about the life challenges faced by grandpa and grandma all those many years ago. We make idols of celebrities in our generation but what of the past generation or two. Maybe those of us who are older will well remember a film star out of the 1940s such as Loretta Young but young people don't (and for those who are older, who remembers or cares about Gloria Swanson as a sex goddess of the 1920s, for example). The same can be said of any other type of famous person. Today, some of us remember a few notable things that Ike did, for instance, but as we go back further, say, to William Howard Taft, we remember or care little or nothing about his life and the issues faced by that generation (even more so as we recede further - Franklin Pierce anyone?). Indeed, this is one of the problems of getting older. As our prime fades, and as things move on, fewer and fewer people care about what we did with our life's struggles and we can feel progressively marginalized and isolated as we enter into our 60s, 70s, 80s, etc. Only those who are our contemporaries can reflect upon and appreciate our life's accomplishments as they come to know us and as they share the common experiences with us. In time, of course, people die off and then those who relate to the remaining older people become fewer and fewer until the isolation is nearly complete for someone who lives a really long life. For the most part, immediate family might care but no one else does. For the person who is 100 today, no one cares what it was like to live through Prohibition or to have experienced talkies for the first time, or to wonder at the marvel of air travel that no one had ever seen before or to grow up and raise a family in the rural midwest of long ago. That time has come and gone and we, as a relational people, just can't relate any more.
Today, I can look at old photos of my parents (both deceased) and my heart is moved. I can do the same with photos of grandparents whom I actually knew and can relate but with nowhere near the same intensity. But, then, I look at old photos of my great grandparents in the old country from which my parents ultimately emigrated and I feel nothing - it is just some bearded guy posing for a picture in some little hut from a distant land and a distant time.
I love the study of history precisely because it helps bring to life how people lived and dealt with the challenges of their generation, no matter how distant from ours. But most of the events of humanity are forever buried in history in a way that they can never be known. Think of all the millions of people from the 1830s, for example, who lived and died while facing many of the same issues we do today - how am I going to make something of myself? how do I find my life's mate? where do I want to live? do I want to go to school and what should I study? how do I try to change my world for the better? For all those lives, the events and the subsequent memories were as vivid as could be as the lives were lived out and as a generation or two that knew those people remembered or were told stories about what they had done. But, given the passage of enough time, none of this matters one whit to those who live today. Now, nearly two centuries later, only a few high points of that era are remembered and often only from a sterile textbook type of memory (important historical "facts" in a book) about which few people care.
Will a perpetual digital presence on the web change any of this over time? Of course, it can help make vivid the lives of those we knew or directly remember from our lives and those of our contemporaries. It can lessen the "out of sight, out of mind" mode of forgetfulness and make us more easily appreciate those whom we knew and loved or respected while they lived. In this sense, the impact can be profound and particularly so concerning those closest to us in life - it is like my being moved by looking at the old photos of my parents, potentially magnified many times over in having been enriched by stories, anecdotes, written memorabilia, etc. not only from immediate family members but also from friends, acquaintances, and others. What a rich treasure trove this might be to help us remember and honor the memory of those to whom we related and all the more so the closer they were to us in life.
But what will thousands or millions of such narratives mean to those who live two centuries from today looking back on it all. Yes, it might be a rich vein for historians trying to identify broader trends and issues of our era but does it matter beyond that? In other words, would we even care to remember the stories of millions of persons with whom we are unconnected in every way, even if they were ancestors in our direct family line? I don't know but I would suspect that this would be much like looking at that old photo of my great grandparents in the old country. It might be interesting for a passing glance but nothing more. As relational people, it is hard to relate to those with whom we have no connection (or at least very little connection), and the memories of those lives in this sense would be relevant only for a time, i.e., as long as those who could relate still lived.
All this is another way of saying that, in time, the mark we make in this world will inevitably fade. And, for this reason, I doubt that it can be captured by online digital preservation in any way that will prove meaningful beyond the lives of our contemporaries.
All that said, this is a beautiful idea and this piece is a thoughtful evocation of its possibilities. It just can't be overstretched to achieve a goal that is, in my view, beyond the limits of human capacity. We can all be memorialized to a point but the limit is bound by those who remember being able to relate to who we were and what we did. At some point, that connection breaks and the memories fade, no matter how well those lives may be documented online.
However, if there is no modification to human memories, than the people that we remember today will continue to fade away into the distance.
The current generations that receive the longevity gift, will be able to make bigger imprint on an ever large scale as they age, provided that our brains are constantly learning and enhanced by ever more sophisticated cybernetic implants. To that extent, the lives of past people will surely be obscured out by the first generation of almost immortal human beings.
If they have to be, the main value is long-term-ness. Whatever info/pictures I put out there, I'd likely want that to still be there in 10, 20, 50 years. Nobody has done that type of long-termness well, so far, that I know off.
What I might want to put online is their digital archive: the stuff they chose to share online while alive, archived for a long time.
I'm not sold on permanent archiving as a selling point, given that companies (particularly startups) aren't permanent. I do hope they explore ways to support themselves by selling a bound paper form of the contributions to a site or allow users to download a nicely designed PDF containing the pictures and stories.
Side note: the true losses i've experienced of family records were precipitated by ignorant relatives disposing of things they had no right to. My only ever data loss was also caused by carelesness or malice by a third party.
As a direct result of this i realy got into learning about everything from backup tape wear to filw system formats, data integrity. I suppose that might be a silver lining, certainly i am able to use what i learned most weeks for work.
But my real concern is how little people understand bit-rot and data integrity in general for storage. My view is nothing is yet truly archival quality. One of the things i learned was the way careful movie studios (used to?) separate their color originals into monochrome R,G,B reels, because the mono stock lasts so much longer, doesn't fade. Also i learned about Technicolor, which uses organic dyes which don't fade or hardly fade. But the original technicolor process is no longer used, apparently the last few lab setups were sold to China. I think China maybe got a good deal, and i wonder if we won't see it making a revival? That thought came courtesy of Andy Grove's recent interview where he observes that if we throw the "low tech" jobs away to other ambitious countries, eventually they innovate with it, like RCA / Westinghouse televisions and then Sony who then outsoruced to Korea who are the present hib of plasmas / lcds and so on.
What i mean is, don't outsource your family records and memories. Write stuff on paper.Print digital picstures on the best current Epson or Canon ink and put them in a dry dark place. Put a lock on it or put it under a attorney managed storage contract so your kids can get access but not throw it away in a fit of upset or stupidity.
As for this service, i admit i've not read much on their site, but where is the front and center discussion of how they've addressed the myriad ways data gets lost / corrupted?
I looked hard at trying to start a service similar to this, but not with the same angle. No way could i make the numbers work on a "freemium" model. Some website outfits do diligent archive style backup for pro photogs, and they charge very serious amounts of money, and i couldn't get any of those on record as to storage policies. It's not just having ZFS, but every app which touches your data better be doing checksums and more, and when i modelled my own idea, i had a 4 - tier multi redundant system that extensively used WORM tape for anything flagged "archive". The numbers got hard at the point the equipment his EOL or cumulative MTBF required preventative reinvestment. I was looking hard at trying to find insurance cover so that, should three data centers all fail, i could at least give some financial condolence to customers / cover lawsuits, but never got right at the kind of person who could quote me. I suppose that would be "cat risk" and i'd need a big "RE" not a front line insurer, but that was only part of my problem. If data is truly private - it might be of a marriage which went wrong and you only want those records to be available after a decent amount of time has passed - you need to build a fairly sensible, but necessarily complex, security model. Then there's the simpler fun of where to store keys, and how do you make any of this easy to use . .
I fear that projects like this risk more tears than they solve problems. The obituary thing is just a gimmick. What print paper runs an obit (for real,not as a paid insertion) without someoe caring to contact them and explain why this person was significant. Not only that but the few obits of friends of mine had to be written on a volunteer basis, even for pretty well known people, because the paper (a major national) allocated no budget for that beyond very high profile people.
I don't want to simply knock this project, because it's an interesting idea, but i think it's flawed and fragile. I don't want to place trust with a faddish organisation when, heck, i've been burned by trusted family and weak courts and straight up accidents and worst of all, couldn't care less attitudes. Only you care enough to do this. If we all did, maybe family life would get a lot nicer for some of us?
Just a thought. Best to all.
Digital systems pose their own problems, of course. There's media obsolescene (8-inch floppies, anyone?), digital integrity (bit drift, etc.), and media integrity (oops, that tape broke again). Much of what keeps archivists busy is deciding protocols for the continuous migration of images from one generation of media to another.
For really good up to date information on image permanence, I recommend the independent, non-profit (unlike Wilhelm) Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. They've got some excellent, free downloads on both the basics and the advanced stuff. Wilhelm's book may be free, but it's very old and out of date. http://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/
This is a sea change in just the last few years, too -- I lost everything I wrote in college with the exception of one paper, but now with Dropbox I'm likely to never lose anything I create ever again.
In a few decades I'll probably need a personal archivist to sift through for the good bits and give my grandkids something with a narrative to it.
I think a good feature to add would be some sort of kiosk mode that could be used during a wake or reception by just putting a web browser on one of your pages and it would rotate through photos, guestbook entries, etc. like a slide show but would drop in to the guestbook with a mouse click and go back to the slideshow after the page went idle for a while.
Another good feature would be a way for people to buy coffee-table books of a site to save as a personal memory. I'm certain with some effort and partnerships with a publisher, you could create a well designed book automatically from the data you have. I put together a video montage of my father after he passed away and having something tangible that you can have of a loved one is always comforting.
Finally as a way to generate traffic, I'd consider building some killer example sites of celebrities as soon as the news breaks of some celebrity's passing.
I will admit that at first I really disliked this idea. There is something distasteful about profiting from death. After giving it some thought, and looking over some of the memorials, I really think you have something. Of course the key will be to treat people fairly and with respect and kindness. I have seen the poor implementations currently used by funeral homes. Even those seem to be a true source of comfort for the family. Good luck, I hope you're successful.
On the serious side of things, I guess this would be useful for some people but when I read the article, I assumed it was about how you would notify friends and family online - I doubt that many young people read the arbituary in the local newspaper often enough for you to find them there.
That would be a little scary to me as an investor.
A potentially good business model in the future could be to provide services such as taking piles of media from the family and compiling it into slideshows, videos, etc.
There is a ton of analog media that people want digitized. Offering this service to mourning families and creating a package that could be purchased by/for members of the family could be lucrative.
Or is it more scary to tell your customers, from whom you've not yet worked out how to ask for money, which presumably is essential, that maybe before they send in their most valued pictures that they should run a rigourour local backup regimen? Like they'd enjoy that!
Even more scary yet is the potential for this to be a bait and switch. First you upload your treasured family stuff, then the company, for whatever reason, runs out of money to "develop their business model" or changes control or management, and then they send you a bill to "upgrade" your service to keep your records intact, same time as sentient customers realise by that time there's not been enough reinvestment to actually place any kind of measurable guarantee as to the integrity of your data.
"Please send me the things you most care for, all your precious family stuff. Don't worry, i'll work out a way of making money out of you later!"
That's what i hear.
Meanwhile, optical "rusts", drive controllers fail, popular FSs do nothing to prevent corruption even on simple copy functions (NTFS, looking at you, but you're not alone) and consumer spec HDDs are doing duty cycles more like enterprise array components did a short while back, as machines get used increasingly 24/7 by family members, for streaming vids, for all the stuff many individuals rely on to keep their present social life intact, let alone their legacy family life preserved.
I'm not wholly against TechCrunch, it is useful to have all the startup hopefuls in one place for reference. But with the readership they have, and not even one cursory mention of the pitfalls which are well known to anyone professionally touched by the storage industry, is a travesty. Their advertising revenue is no - doubt robust as a consequence.
I keep reminding myself, that despite Google's history as a bait and switch (from "no advertising" to biggest ad agency in their economy) the most significant thing they've done is make the general public aware of the value in archive, in scanned works, out of copyright works, and even - allowing this is hugely contentious - in the value of capturing storing and promoting "abandoned" works, the value of which no-one likely knows. I've strong reservations as to Google's approach. But if you read William Patry, their counsel for copyright, you couldn't find a more lucid general, philosophical approach to why what they do is not against the spirit of copyright law. (which views i believe he held before he joined Google) . Oops, touching on a huge subject, but my private view is that because Google can do this, whether they effectively monetise it or not, they are alerting a vast cross-section of the population to the idea there's value in old works, scanning, digital preservation. Having run a "ancient work" preservation project more than a decade ago, which flunked as budget was really beyond a small outfit who had to turn income more directly, and the quality ambition was high even by current expectations, the thing which bugged me was the number of people who suggested the effort was futile, of no particular value. Now, of course, i get told how such projects are futile because Google will just do them, but there's more art to preservation than they are generally doing - they showed the mass route and network effects can be done. Some of the stuff i was involved in capturing simply isn't even in national libraries. Not bitter or anything, in fact just jealous i'd not been born a decade or two later to enjoy all of this when i was in education, thinking i'd not have dropped out had i been able to do so much research so readily i'd have quickly understood my interests the better :)
I think it's fair to be skeptical of new companies offering long term services. I wasn't bashing the company who is subject of this discussion. I was merely saying that the scary bit is not just i you're an investor but possibly also as a customer. Anyone recently read a SEC filing of their bank / thrift / life policy company? My most important thought regards this discussion is that there are ways you can communicate the stability of your company to customers who wish to rely on it over long periods of time. One way i imagine not to do that well, is to point out you've no business model. That's not quite the same as a "caveat emptor" warning. In fact the lack of plan, or general presentation of te service, has obviously been taken to be altruistic by some observers who have commented here. No problem with that, it's a cool idea, but try it differently, would you buy archive length storage from me, even for good money, if i said i'd no idea how to break even? Or is it okay only if it's free, which presumably it cannot be later on? How would you make this break even?
I don't like where TechCrunch went with it. They called Legacy's "cash extraction procedures" cheesy. I don't think that's the right word for it. I think, as described by the article, unethical would be the right word.
I looked at Respectance's pricing. It seems they make it so the person who create the site and who sponsor it can be different people.
I don't see great memorials starting like this: A) someone decides to create a site, but doesn't want to put too much into it B) the community rallies around it C) a generous member of the community forks over the cash. I think more often, great things are created by people who care about it. Like the sample site. The founder put a lot of effort into making his loved one's site great. I'm sure in the face of that, $59 or so wouldn't have stopped him.
As for free trials, I don't really think they're appropriate. I think it's what makes it feel like "cash extraction" rather than paying for a valuable service. I think that the only free trial that's needed is the ability to create a site, and pay a one-time fee to get it published, and to keep it online, accepting contributed content, and with an export tool.
On this page, there's an "unrendered" —
Great concept, good execution.
I've been looking for a online community where the other users don't annoy me for quite a while.
I'd much rather trust the long term hosting of my memories to a company that is around for the long haul like Wordpress or Google, or one of many other companies with products that aren't marketed for this purpose, but provide similar (actually a lot more) functionality.