Inspirations

The inspiration for writing this digital biography derives from a number of sources. As a family historian, I have an almost insatiable curiosity to know who my ancestors were and how they lived. I suppose this could be viewed as a form of filial piety.

My first endeavours began a number of years ago. I sought to reconstruct a portion of our family tree that had been lost when a family Bible mysteriously disappeared. I was able to both discover what was missing and add a great deal of wholly unknown material to a story that very much surprised and intrigued me. I have spent many a year following up the other lines of my family.

Other people have also taken up the challenge and sites such as Ancestry have helped us to uncover hints and clues. These would have been denied to us in the past due to the tyranny of distance. We can now obtain digitised records that would have been difficult to source and to access previously.

This upsurge of interest in family history has lead to the development of shows such as “Who Do You Think You Are?”  In each episode, we join celebrities in their search to find family treasures. That people also discover family tragedies only heightens our desire to listen to a good story, well told.

In addition to being a family historian, I am also an academic. I do research into how and why people are able to bounce back from difficulty and achieve relatively healthy lives in the midst of seeming disaster. The focus of my research has been on prisoners of the Japanese during World War II.

My work is very much based on social psychology and phenomenology. No one is an island, each of us needs others to both survive and thrive. Yet, each of us has a different capacity to engender, access or use the resources required to deal with life stressors and reduce tension which can lead to stress breakdown. So, my skills in historical and social research have helped my work as a family historian.

Finally, I have been intimately involved with technology for most of my life. My grandfather was a telephone lineman. My father was involved in advanced telemetry and communications. I gained my radiotelegraphy license at an early age and was an electronics technician in the Navy for a number of years.

I was well prepared for the advent of the World Wide Web and have been involved with Unix-based computing for many years. I am an advocate for Free/Libre and Open Source Software and a member of the Free Software Foundation. I very much value the sense of community and the desire to achieve a public good that we often see in this movement.

However, as Jacques Ellul and Albert Borgmann have both highlighted, there can be a very dark side to technology. We can become entangled in a passive and consumerist approach to its use. We all face the temptation to mindlessly adopt and be shaped by the ubiquitous technologies that promise to make our life less laborious.

Instead of freeing us from drudgery, technology often fosters and facilitates frenetic activity in both our work and leisure. Additionally, it can be a vehicle by which corporations and institutions manage both our interests and identities to their benefit. In fact, our very privacy as persons can be destroyed or debased.

Technology produces both shadows and light (lumiere et ombres). How will we stay out of the shadows and dwell in the light? Good question.