This time however I did not think of myself as that lucky - when my computer (logicboard) died, it seemed unreasonable to scrape together my notes and start anew - after all, I had been working with a document that I had been revising for weeks and weeks.  Basic ideas are one thing, but recovering citations and source information is quite another.  Yet, even though I was bracing myself for extreme disaster, it never seemed to come.  Miraculously - with all my Google Doc usage, emailing out, saving my information on remote sites - I found that I not only had one good copy of my thesis, but several copies, saved and transfered at different points of revision.  I found that my other files like photographs and videos (which normally I would have been upset about losing) were also strangely distributed across the web through sites like YouTube and Facebook.  While I had previously thought of my life as being contained in one place, it was suddenly shown to me as a vast network for links and uploads. 

This got me thinking... what are the materials that comprise one's life?  It might be silly to think that computer files are so integral to one's sense of self, but remember about 15 or so years ago, when people used to say that they'd most likely save their photo albums and letters (behind family members and pets, of course) from their house if it was burning down?   In that previous age, we used to think of physical objects as the keys to unlock our memories and experience.  Today, teenagers take more photos than ever (using digital cameras and cell phones alike), but do these 'objects' hold the same value?  The digitalization of these formerly tangible objects has certainly devalued them for me - while I'm photographed today more than ever, I also tend to look at these photographs less than before.  For some reason, my laptop folder full of digital photos (most of them passed onto me through the Internet using sites like Facebook and Ofoto) are less precious to me than the old box of paper photos sitting on my top shelf, or the leather-bound family albums tucked away in my parents' living room.   Somehow those photos feel like 'mine,' whereas the other photos of me that crop up on Facebook or elsewhere seem like public property - it's like comparing your own copy of your favorite novel to a copy of that same book at the library - or maybe even its pages as can be seen on Project Gutenberg or Google Books.  In general, my experience with my computer has made me see first-hand how our personal notions of property and ownership are changing as a result of our increasingly networked and digital world.  Older notions of 'mine' and 'yours' don't really seem as applicable today or as easy to define as they did previously.  

Because we are a research group dedicated to these ideas of new "skills and cultural competencies" which are needed to fully engage in the digital participatory world, it seems reasonable to consider the perspective from which we are defining these things.  While I used to consider photographs, videos and texts as "private property," now they seem to be (at least to me and perhaps those students younger than me) just the materials that comprise the Internet, available for public use.  While this concept has been extensively discussed in its legal dimensions in the press, I wonder about how we at Project NML will begin to deal with it on a personal, cultural level.  Will a string of texts between high school sweethearts ever hold the same weight in the future as a box full of love letters that you find in your parents' attic?  Or does the ease of erasure and circulation of texts and information give rise to a new way of thinking about these artifacts of the past?  Who knows?  The only thing is - as I move forward in trying to define essential concepts of ownership, authorship, appropriation and remixing (for the Project NML Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture), I hope to remember that my ideas about these terms are strongly formed by my hybrid experience of the digital/tangible world, and that I should remain sensitive to the fact that ideas around these are continually being shaped and re-shaped by teens in the digital world today.