Yesterday in class we developed our Google Map for the many locations Jeannette Walls and her family called home over the course of her life; after matching these locations with specific scenes in the book, we can track Jeannette’s childhood across the United States from the West to the East. Seeing those scenes, and tracing the progression of events through the book, a clear change in tone occurs during the family’s move from the Southwest to West Virginia. This transition underscores the true extent of the Walls family’s dysfunction, when Rex and Rose Mary leave their children in the hands of Rex’s abusive mother. This made me think about how we recall our lifelong notions of “home”, and how we choose to represent those notions for ourselves and others; many of us scrapbook, keep photos in general, journal about our life, and more recently posting to social media.

What if we made maps like we made in class instead? Tracking what we consider “home” from place to place, from time to time, and building a kind of digital atlas of our lives. Not only could such a record be a fulfilling form of self-reflection, it could help people to see where they want to go. Understanding where we have been, and appreciating how that has shaped us, also helps illuminate the direction we may go.

In this blog, I hope to examine how technology and inter-connectivity alter the nature of the home, and offer new avenues of connecting with people and establishing the kinds of support systems that once existed solely within the concept of the household. Have virtual communities offered valuable alternatives to less stable, less voluntary familial ones? By mapping our lives similar to mapping Jeannette’s, we better understand which factors and actors external to the nuclear family influenced our life.

In that spirit, I’m starting another map, this one focused on my life and the places I’ve called home over the years. I’ve linked the Glass Castle Map here, and I will post a link to my personal map very soon.