>There's a pretty big difference between communicating in and about the present vs. communicating about the past. I think what you've identified is the beginning of a distinction between those two activities in the technologies we use.
That's a great observation. I had not explored that line of reasoning. That gives me something to chew on. Right off though, I'd say that... I suspect we used to value communicating about the past more because it was so difficult to do so, but as facebook makes it easier, the value has gone down.
How's this sound: before long epics were written down, the oral tradition of reciting them kept them alive, and thus the entire process was valued. Once they were written, it got easier to 'remember' the epics. S, writing was not as valuable as orally remembering/reciting because it was easier/more common/not as important? This is not the best comparison, but sounds right to me at the moment.
I think you're partly right, but I think another aspect of it is how new all this technology is. We completely dropped the "old" way of doing things (carefully take photo, get it developed, store it in an album) and replaced it with the current way (take lots of photos, upload them all to some service, share with friends) in a decade or less. Most people simply haven't accumulated all that much history on these services yet. It'll be interesting to see what our personal histories look like once this technology has been around for a few more decades. Things like the Facebook timeline may become increasingly important, or we may all abandon curated histories because (as you say) information is so easily retrieved now.
That's a great observation. I had not explored that line of reasoning. That gives me something to chew on. Right off though, I'd say that... I suspect we used to value communicating about the past more because it was so difficult to do so, but as facebook makes it easier, the value has gone down.
How's this sound: before long epics were written down, the oral tradition of reciting them kept them alive, and thus the entire process was valued. Once they were written, it got easier to 'remember' the epics. S, writing was not as valuable as orally remembering/reciting because it was easier/more common/not as important? This is not the best comparison, but sounds right to me at the moment.