Mia Freedman Wednesday 16 May 2012 12:01pm

• (16)
• (6)
• (343)

Publisher Mia Freedman

BY MIA FREEDMAN Welcome to Mamamia’s Wednesday tradition that is open post of the week. Once a week we dispense with a theme and just open the post to you and anything you want to talk about.

On My Mind (OMM): I am constantly tortured by the idea that I’m not capturing memories. That I’m failing to record all those special moments. So periodically, I go into a frenzy of photo taking, inspired by the thought of all those heart-warming images I’ll have on film. And then … what?

The biggest challenge in documenting modern life is what you do with all the evidence. Invariably, all those digital photos start piling up in different place – Facebook, Twitter, blogs, flickr, iphoto, your phone, various hard drives….. waiting accusingly for you to DO SOMETHING WITH THEM, DAMMIT.

People have been observing for a while now that we are the generation who won’t leave anything behind (other than, yo know, environmental damage).

I have boxes of letters and photos going back to primary school but the letters stop in the nineties and the photos stop around 2004 when life began to go virtual.

My teenage son has half a dozen photo albums documenting his babyhood. A few years later when my daughter was born? Not a tangible thing. Yes, she has albums but between one child and the next, this word has come to represent something entirely different – a collection of photos on my computer. Sure, there are hundreds of them – and even the odd digital album I’ve made -  but where my firstborn will have volumes of actual albums and boxes of photos, she’ll have … a hard disk or 5? And don’t even get me started on my third child. He just has some snaps on my phone. OH THE GUILT.

At least the idea of grabbing your photo albums in case of fire is now virtually redundant. You simply grab your computer.

But what is this innate need I have to see my life and the life of my family all laid out and properly documented? What’s that about?

When we first began talking to LifeWise (a non-commercial organisation promoting the benefits of Life Insurance and income protection) about what we could do at Mamamia around this idea of awareness, I brought up the idea of wishing I had a Time Capsule to pull together all my life memories from all the different digital places I’m stockpiling them.

We spent the next 6 months developing the Lifewise Time Capsule which we launched this week and which we’ve been playing with for days. It’s a bit addictive (and free and this is not a sponsored post and woot!).

Here is a screen shot of part of my time capsule – we have some more in the behind-the-scenes gallery from others in the MM Team:

It’s super simple to make your own -takes all of 60 seconds – you just go here and follow the instructions.

I also had a fun day last Friday taking a 3yo dressed in a superman costume and his 1year old fairy god sister onto live television. If you haven’t seen how that went down, take a look:

Now take a look at what’s been happening around MM HQ this week. Photos are by MM’s news editor Rick Morton. (who is good fun to follow on Twitter).

Matching! My scarf is from Joshua Goot, jacket is Supre, pants and shoes are Sportsgirl.

•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  

Your turn now… what’s on your mind?