Archiving the Past, Present and Future
One of the biggest reason for starting this blog is to have an archive of my thoughts, in hopes of being able to reflect back on where ideas, theories and creativity came from. I daily Twitter, update my Facebook status and contribute to my daily photoblog, which makes me very reflective on my immediate state of mind. This covers off the past and present, but I’ve yet to find an application that facilitates future-casting. There are so many that try to predict the future and obsess about their own personal future that a tool that facilitates that would surely be societally beneficial.
I worry that our obsession with the past and present and the amount of tools and applications dedicated to facilitating this archiving that there is no encouragement to look at our future or how our present and past acts make up our future.
I would posit this lack of reflectivity on the future was a big reason for the success of Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth. Mr. Gore was able to put a slide presentation that actually put some future casting into the mass media. Most mass media is not looking to the future in this blunt and simple way. When we think of the future we think of sci-fi, which approaches the future is a far more abstract way then a slide presentation, a blog or a Twitter update.
For myself I’ve used Journler for Mac as a personal diary, but I’ve now set the date to future dates in hopes of forcing myself to be critical of where I’ll be.