Today, as never before, you can capture your life and share it with your friends and family. Camera phones, media players with built-in microphones, portable storage and blogging software enable you to record whatever happens, while cheap hard drives mean you can keep it forever. All this adds up to what the Trendwatching.com website reckons is an emerging megatrend called “life caching”.

“Why do we think this trend is ready to take off? Well, the necessary enablers are now all in place: required hardware and software are ubiquitous, there’s ample availability of affordable storage space, blogging mentality is hitting the masses, and some of the major ‘new economy’ brands are getting in on the game, promising mass life-caching products at mass prices,” says the site.



Life caching is already explicit in Show Your World, the US advertising for Samsung camera phones, cited by Trendwatching. The campaign says that capturing images and turning them into mini-movies is “the most vibrant way to capture and share life experiences with family and friends”.



Of course, life caching is not a new idea, as Egypt’s pyramids show. Generations of people have kept diaries, scrapbooks and photo albums. US scientist Vannevar Bush envisaged keeping everything in a Memex machine, in a famous essay published in the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly. And in 1992, usability guru Don Norman wrote about everyone having a personal Teddy: you would get it when you were two or three years old, and it would store all the experiences you ever had.



But four things have brought these futuristic visions much closer to reality. First, new devices such as camera phones and digital recorders have made it much easier to record your life. Second, the use of digital media has allowed all the different types of record to be combined instead of stored separately. Third, the cost of disk storage has fallen to the point where many PC users can afford the terabyte or two of storage needed to keep everything. Finally, the internet has made it easy to share the results.



More here.