Motherhood, archiving and the text message
Personal recordkeeping in the digital age is an interesting prospect. Take the text message. If you’re a mobile phone user and send text messages, do you intentionally save any you create or receive?
No? Perhaps your messages are all banal, along the lines of arranging meetings, pick ups from the station or fish and chip dinners. The one person I surveyed admitted to said messaging – none of her texts are worth saving.
Now I, on the other hand, relatively new to mobile phones and mothering, have embraced the text message for the personal and find that there are some I want to keep.
I would like to have kept the text message I sent to friends on the day my long awaited daughter Iris was born. I know I sent it on April the 28th, but I don’t know what I wrote (or when precisely I sent it – before or after I fainted twice in the delivery room?) because last time I checked my phone the message was gone. Only the last six messages I had sent were still there in my Sent Items. Many more messages have survived in my Inbox, including the replies to my birth notice text and I treasure those.
In order to keep them I have had to make sure I regularly delete the mundane and the tedious, no loss. Yet there will come a time I must sacrifice some I want to keep for others I want to keep more. Like another birth notice email from a friend, received recently with a tear of joy. These are special messages.
And it is not only these. I also treasure the practical emails of advice from my sister and my friend about the small delights and worries of new motherhood. Like the reassuring responses to my text about Iris’s vivid green poo sent after 10.30 one night in the early days, or the delighted appreciative texts to my news that Iris had slept through the night! These are great personal records in the milestones of my journey with Iris.
But are they destined to stay forever (and I doubt very much that forever means more than the life of my SIM card) locked away in my mobile phone?
I have found surprisingly little on the Internet about this issue – a blog post about an SMS Text Message Backup Service at Yahoo! India and a similar service in the UK. Neither of these appeal to me. I’d like to extract my data (for free) and maintain its recordness (details of sender, recipient, time sent/received as well as content) in a system of my own controlling.
For the moment though, I’ve had fun with the camera recording these little bytes of life.
So would your phone bits become cluttered and run slow etc like your computer which regularly gets cleaned up, defragged, or compressed…maybe a photo of the screen is the answer - my messages are certainly not memorable except for the spelling!
You ought to try Twitter. You can txt directly there as well. I’m at http://twitter.com/moonfever0
I wish I had something to clever to suggest. Your texts are a unique records. Kids’ phases pass without you even noticing; even within a few weeks you find yourself in a new phase and the situations that once needed every scrap of your energy and ingenuity are suddenly forgotten because of new demands. Your photographs seem to be the best solution for now. They also act as records of your recordkeeping dilemma!
I meant to reply to these but didn’t, until now. Searching on technorati as I do occasionally to see whether anyone has blogged one of my Flickr photos, and came across this post which had blogged my post here. Men! So economical with birth announcements!
Mary, I can’t bring myself to spell in abbreviation; Angela, I just don’t understand Twitter! Anne-Marie, how right you are.
In the Flickr conversation which accompanied this image, one person said they write the messages down, abbreviations and all. I’m glad I asked the question!