Once I was an activist in the areas of labor, housing, civil rights, and education. Then I ran a theater and engaged in national and international discussions of cultural democracy. Then, I evolved a method of practice, digital storytelling.
There was this moment, when Brooke and I were standing in the boarding line at the Belém airport on Thursday, when the nice guy organizing the queue took a look at me and, in Portuguese, suggested what I understood to be, “Oh, you can bypass the line, given your age.
I write from Sao Paulo, Brazil. I find myself at the end of a two year odyssey to generate what became the 12th International Digital Storytelling Conference (and the first International Conference of Social Memory Technology, more on that later). Of course, the week has been both emotional and inspiring,
“Age tech needs to be reliable, easy to use, accurate and affordable” – Empowering Independence With Technology..., AARP Here’s another pocket field guide to the next 25 years of “elderware”—the gadgets, apps, and services that might shape how we care for our bodies, move through our towns, savor our
“Old age can be understood only in the context of social conditions and issues of the larger social order.” — Dr. Carroll L. Estes I grew up in the home of a union organizer. Actually two organizers, although my mom was probably better described as a multi-issue organizer, race, gender,
“We know from research that smoking shortens your life and that abuse of alcohol is also bad. But what most people die of is loneliness. It is a greater hazard, because it leads to people dying from cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s and other ailments. It also leads to people feeling
So there was this article back at the end of July in the New Yorker. Headline read: Mexico’s Molar City Could Transform My Smile. Did I Want It To? (if no NewYorker subscription) I happened to have a friend in my community that had been to Algodones, Mexico to
I walked into Iconick, one of my neighborhood cafés here in Santa Fe last week and watched two scenes unfold at once. In the front, a young barista helped an older patron with their payment app, leaning shoulder‑to‑shoulder like kin. In the back, a table of retirees argued
Confessions of An Aging Digital Storyteller I began this inquiry in August with a detective’s hunch and a teacher’s itch. I wanted to see how the next quarter century of technology might bend the arc of story work—how it might make us better listeners to ourselves and
When I look around at this moment, sinking into the context many of us find ourselves in, we are clearly in a period of rupture. Maybe we are always in such a state of change. It feels to me, as a US citizen with a distinctly progressive perspective, that most
Story Work and Aging in the Mid-21st Century I have always related to the stories I’m living. As a married person with no children working as an activist and artist, I connected with folks like me. As a parent of two children, the stories around me were of
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This is Elderware: Story Work and Aging in the mid-21st Century, the weekly postings by Joe Lambert premiering September 15. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when