Media, Culture, and Education

Abstract

I had the experience last year of bearing witness to a life lived entirely offline. In clearing my late aunt’s possessions and memorabilia from a house in which she had lived for more than 50 years, there was an opportunity to reflect on which aspects of our lived experience are exhibited and shared and how. My aunt was a very private person in an era in which it was perfectly possible to have no sense of obligation to share or display details of one’s life for all, or even for some, to see. She never married. She served the local community as a nurse for all her working life and later as a volunteer working with refugee families. Among her possessions, and hidden from view, were her swimming certificates, school photos, and her volunteer red cross membership during which, aged about 14, she tended to the injured in the bombing of London in the second world war. She regularly kept the slenderest of diaries from the 1950s, most entries so short that they were like distant ancestors of the tweet, the current 140-character summary of history and responses, hers dictated not by a social media site but by the amount of space available in the entry spaces in which she wrote with her pen. We learned how she reacted to some of the notable events of the twentieth century (“Terrible news from Dallas today,” “Some men walked on the moon,” etc.) alongside short notes on outings, family, and friends. Looking through her house for evidence of twenty-first-century devices, one struggled to find more than a set top box for her TV.