The Zoom meetings and the website are forging new spaces for family relationships that are adding richness to our lives. Steve has raised the questions about how we may be able to expand our reach to new generations as exemplified by Brent’s participation. Our generation has time to spare and to burn. Brent’s generation is deeply engaged with both professional and personal concerns that are settled conditions for most of us.
I am reminded again and again about the need to incorporate and integrate new media to our communication tools. The reminders are both contemporary and historical. The contemporary version comes from my almost daily contact with YouTube and the role of video media in teaching, conveying information on how-to-do-it, as well as transmitting a point of view. The historical comes from our family now being actively engaged with an extended range of connections and uncovering treasure hidden in boxes in attics, garages and basements. As boxes are opened, we now see potential for dissemination of messages embedded in images of the past and the words of our ancestors’ worlds that are preserved in letters and news clippings. Interestingly, there seems to be no clear, clean border about the extent of our connections. Second cousins are already involved and I’m seeing a future where there are third and fourth cousins involved, not to mention a half dozen or more generations.
The Round Robin served our parents for over a half century. What they did with their letters is incompletely known but so far, there is little evidence that much of anything was saved. By contrast, we are trying to establish a condition in this digital world where what remains of our generation and the next extant generations will be able to access easily and quickly a trove of rich historical and anecdotal images and text-based, narrative messages. (Of course, images are messages.) We also must hope to convey messages that are of high quality and retain the values demanded by our contemporary state of being. That doesn’t just mean that our messages are hip and couched in the lingo of our time, although that may form a part of our communications.
WordPress is ideally set up to be a blog and we may find new ways to implement that function. One key, which came up on Wednesday evening, could be to enroll people as contributors. I need to gain experience with how that may work. That experience will come only through feedback from a cohort of contributors. They, and perhaps they alone, will be able to “contribute” and inform the editors about how to best use and publish their contributions. I need to do more thinking about this as a potential for adding rich content to the site. It is that rich content that will inform what potential we can tap going forward.
One thing that is becoming increasingly clear is that I can’t continue to sustain my central role with both the website and the Zoom meetings. So far, there is only one reasonably active editor. The other designated editors are fairly silent especially when it comes to publishing. I don’t understand why this is the case; although, I suspect that the perfect may be the enemy of the good.
XXX — 20200821 –8:58am