Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
By PETER FUNT APRIL 5, 2019
For more than a century, baseball fans in Chicago have saved ticket stubs to preserve memories, both fond and frustrating, of their beloved Cubbies.
Some Cubs’ tickets — like one from the 1932 World Series in which Babe Ruth is said to have “called his shot” before homering for the Yankees — are worth thousands. But most, sitting in drawers or pasted into scrapbooks, are valuable simply as physical links to the past.
That’s over. This season the Cubs have joined more than a dozen other Major League teams in eliminating paper tickets in favor of digital versions, downloaded to apps and displayed on phones.
And so ticket stubs join theater playbills, picture postcards, handwritten letters and framed photos as fading forms of preserving our memories. It raises the question, Is our view of the past, of our own personal history, somehow different without hard copies?
When my mother died a few years ago, we sifted through albums and shoe boxes in which she had lovingly archived her children’s lives. Handwritten report cards from grade school. News clippings of Little League games. Postcards from summer camp. And so many photos: birthdays, graduations, weddings, trips to wonderful places.
Mom was not a hoarder. She was typical of a generation that found it pleasing to keep memories alive by retaining hard copies. Not that she had much choice: She never owned a computer or cellphone.
After my father’s death, in 1999, I saved a folder of handwritten condolence letters from his friends and colleagues. Rereading them once or twice a year, I am transported back to times I miss so much. Of course, I received many emails about Dad as well — but I wouldn’t begin to know how or where to find them. Besides, personal messages are so much more meaningful when presented in the hand of the sender.
My two kids, now in their 20s, have mostly digital keepsakes. Increasingly they rely on Facebook and the cloud to store memories. Their letters from college, sent by email, are long gone. Many photos, never printed, have disappeared. I worry that for them, personal history already doesn’t reach back as far as it should.
Researchers know that of the two primary forms of accessing memory, recognition and recall, the former is a simpler and more reliable process. It is the association of a physical object with something previously encountered or experienced. This could be because tangible memories utilize all five senses, evoking emotional triggers and transporting us back to a precise time, place or moment.
In his new book, “Digital Memory Studies,” Andrew Hoskins, a professor of social science at the University of Glasgow, concludes: “Despite the decay and wear and tear of photographs, letters and other objects that are reminders of people and past experiences, their keeping is like holding on to those people and experiences.” Digital items offer nothing of the kind.
In my youth I collected things. I kept baseball cards in cigar boxes. I carefully slipped pennies into slots in cardboard sleeves and pasted stamps into an album. As my interest in journalism grew, I maintained a thick scrapbook of newspaper front pages. And yes, I still have a cherished batch of Broadway playbills and ticket stubs from games at Yankee Stadium.
This kind of collecting — not just accumulating but, to use a trendy term in its analog sense, curating — is likewise different when it involves the physical.
Mark B. McKinley, a psychologist who teaches at Lorain Community College in Ohio, explained in The National Psychologist that collecting physical memorabilia is a form of “experimenting with arranging and classifying” elements of our world. This, he says, “can serve as a means of control to elicit a comfort zone in one’s life, e.g., calming fears, erasing insecurity.” It’s no wonder children are fond of collecting things — it’s critical to their mental and emotional development.
I looked at several parenting websites to see what children collect nowadays. One mother’s note from Kentucky caught my eye: “My son collects Lego sets, Bionicles, Mario figurines and lumps of broken concrete.”
It would be easy to knock the concrete collection, but I actually find it kind of cool. The kid might become a great geologist or a successful contractor.
But will his mom print out a photo of that unique collection? Will his degree in geology be memorialized on paper, or will he be given a digital diploma? Will he frame his first contractor’s paycheck or will he be paid by direct deposit? And if he ever makes it to Wrigley Field, will he find a way to remember the ballgame without a ticket stub?
Peter Funt is a writer and TV host.
Tags
Who is online
84 visitors
I feel for that loss. Perhaps I'm just old school, but in Canada I was a collector, and the things I collected (most of which are now gone) were important to me - for the memories. As Bob Hope sang "Thanks for the memories..." If the direction is for all items that could invoke memories become digital, I think we as human beings will become digital as well, and remembered by others only if maintained in a memory stick.
I can’t think of a more insidious thing to collect than broken chunks of concrete, but to each their own I guess.
I am terrible about maintenance of my main email account. I don’t delete everything, thinking I may need this or that record some day - but the time it would take to find anything useful in that sea of crap makes it a stupid policy. One day out of boredom, I just started in on deleting hundreds of old emails. As I went back further and further in time, I discovered emails so old that I had no idea I still had them, and in many cases no recollection of them even occurring. It got so interesting that I stopped deleting them, so that I could entertain myself on another rainy day in the future.
I imagine that the chance to go back and review the tens of thousands of NV or NT comments I’ve made over the last decade would also be enlightening. For public figures, such a venture might prove to be terrifying. I remember Joy Reid recently had a scare, whereby someone had dug up some ancient social media comments that were quite unflattering and went public. She claimed no memory of making them, but apologized anyway. People change with time, but the internet has a vast memory.
I have some Emails that are older than a Decade but I've never printed them I just haven't deleted them. I've often wondered about how these new digital formats will affect our families in the future. I remember looking at old pictures at my grandparents farm, these were people I never new and most were long dead but my grandmother knew every name and how they were related to us. These days people take more pictures than ever before but very few are printed most are stored on a computer or phone or in the cloud. If you die will your family know where to retrieve those photo's, do they even know your passwords. Maybe Facebook is the family album of the future but so much trash gets mixed in that who wants to sort through it all.
Good question.
I try to hold on to what is important.
Yet, electronic media has sever faults. Many/most think it will last forever. Think again.
Couple examples at different levels, and to think it doesn't happen to the "big boys" is a mistake.
In the early 80s we developed and ran an HIS system (phraseology courtesy of the department redundancy department) at Fairchild AFB. The system booted from an 8" floppy then operated the "application" off a second 8" floppy where patient data was also stored. I know that data it made it to the next generation system, because we developed and deployed that system as well. I know it made it to the next generation as well, as I managed a team responsible for the data conversion, among other things as well.
Then along the way, not long after I went off to other adventures, things kind of went to hell.
We have an example TODAY on this very board of a of a US Navy service member who's patient data was lost during an HIS system upgrade/replacement.
Yes. In this day of the cloud, disaster recovery plans and backup system meant to maintain continuity of operations even in the event of a tac nuke exchange. Then before even having the need to switch over to the failover site, there redundancy within redundancy within redundancy for systems these days. A site is going need face some pretty serious problems before switching to failover.
Patient data vanished. Significant and important patient data was lost.
But we have all that fancy, hot lick stuff with all the catch phrases.
Where is that family e-photo album going to rank compared to DoD and VA patient data?
We didn't even have a "disaster" and patient data was lost.
Let's look a little closer to home.
Anybody got any 5.25" floppies with what once was important data? What about those 3 1/2's?
I know, I know it was all archived to CD's, DVR's or tape. Right? Well, I think most of us know by now that stuff degrades.
Back to the cloud? Once I had a web page hosted by Verizon. One day they pulled the plug. You got notification the next time trying to access your site. I still feel litigious about that.
But there are places like photobucket, right? Funny, I just got an email from them this morning telling me I now owe them something like 4 - 5 bucks a month if I want to use their services as I once did. Fair enough, it is their site, but why in the hell did they resize my photos without advance notice during phase I of this paradigm shift a couple years ago, which, for all intents and purposes ruined some of them.
When will photobucket begin making other unannounced decisions regarding folk data content?
Use another host? Okay, which one can we predict to be good keepers of our data?
There are other storage technologies, unfortunately, for the average Joe, they are not here yet.