The Mutability of Personal Documents and Mediated Memories as We Age: A Collaborative ReflectionTLE

How do our personal documentation practices change as we age, and how can we create and save personal evidence of ourselves for our family’s future? All of us continually accumulate information about ourselves in our everyday lives, intentionally, incidentally, or otherwise, for self-presentation, self-fulfillment, reminders of our past, reinforcing identity, as a hobby, for personal documentation, or for peace of mind. Increasingly, this evidence is in digital form, and often in the cloud. The authors use a collaborative autoethnography and narrative methodology, as outlined by Ford (2020), to document how aging affects our personal documentation and our memories. In the research literature, what are described as personal documentation include oral histories, diaries, letters, narratives incorporating photovoice, online social networks, and other reflective techniques that allow users to record their everyday stories, increasingly using digital technologies. Documents, along with objects and artifacts that act as documents do not hold our memories but are agents that can cue our memories through physical or digital experiences, or through a combination of both, experienced through our senses. As such, they are living documents that grow and evolve as they are carried through our lives and passed on to posterity, for we “primarily make sense of the past through the materiality of things — through objects, artefacts, landscapes, and [our] bodies” (Staats, 2019). According to Lund (2004) documents have aspects that are informational (mental), material (physical) and communicational (social); in other words, they involve our heads, hands, and hearts to create meaning. We, a group of four information researchers, drew on our extensive research experience, each contributing our unique personal narratives, reflections, and observations using a relational approach. By doing so, we were able to construct a shared understanding of our topic. Ultimately, our collaborative examination of our practices resulted in a rich and nuanced portrayal of this complex topic. We take a look at how we can make sense of our own personal and family histories in a holistic manner as we age so that what we leave behind contributes to our family and cultural memory and is not just a data store of indecipherable digital objects or an underbed shoe box of unexplained material artifacts. We explore the challenges of dealing with the wide distribution of personal digital information fragmented through different mediums. Like time, our personal spaces of information are constantly evolving; control and ownership are some of the issues at hand, as well as benign neglect and the lack of responsibility for taking control over personal documents and personal histories. Through this presentation we raise a call to action, and if not us, then who will take responsibility for our repository of personal identities and histories? Leaving our histories in others' hands may lead to a great loss of cultural heritage for contemporary people’s life stories. We realize this will take great effort by individuals, and we see this project as a driving force to promote personal documentation as we age in a time where digital documentation tools present a great risk in maintaining the story of our lives.