There are many ways to record history: verbal story telling, sharing by the written word, audio recording, video recording, electronic digital recording, scratching on the stone walls of our caves ...
But think about which kind of record endures longest, and might be viewed in such a way as to make a difference in the reader's or the viewer's life? In audio recording, wax cones have evolved to vinyl LP records, to cassettes, to CDs, to MP3s, etc. Oral/verbal/audio recording mediums change very quickly. Video formats change so quickly I can't keep up with those changes.
I am advocating a written record (but I do not discount other forms of recording our families' histories).
Carl Sagan writes in Cosmos about books, “… one glance at it and you hear the voice of another person— perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic … Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries, and then flower in the most unpromising soil … If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read”.
But think about which kind of record endures longest, and might be viewed in such a way as to make a difference in the reader's or the viewer's life? In audio recording, wax cones have evolved to vinyl LP records, to cassettes, to CDs, to MP3s, etc. Oral/verbal/audio recording mediums change very quickly. Video formats change so quickly I can't keep up with those changes.
I am advocating a written record (but I do not discount other forms of recording our families' histories).
Carl Sagan writes in Cosmos about books, “… one glance at it and you hear the voice of another person— perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic … Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries, and then flower in the most unpromising soil … If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read”.
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