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Children are expected to study hard and do well. Parents are expected to work and bring up the children well. Grandparents are expected to spoil the children and tell them stories about things long before their time.

But maybe the grandchilden are studying too hard to listen, and the parents have heard most of it already. How to share the wealth of experience? One way is to follow laokokok’s example: keep a blog.

A blog, or web-log, is an internet diary. The beauty of laokokok’s blog, http://timesofmylife.wordpress.com/, is that it is a diary in reverse, memories remembered as and when and logged in without chronological sequence. For example, he quizzes his readers asking if they could identify what turns out to be a Tong Sheng, a Chinese almanac, and then proceeds to explore its contents:

Other entries include investigations of places that have since disappeared, such as Sentosa Primary School, and shops like Oriental and Sogo.

Laokokok’s blog is good in that it does not assert that the past was better; it only asserts what the past was, from one person’s perspective. It presents for the younger generation the same wistful reminiscing that grandparents are wont to do, but in a format that is accessible to them. The blog has been recognized for its social function of keeping the past alive, and won the Best Individual Blog Award in Singapore Blog Awards 2009.

Being willing to embrace new technology and learning to use it has helped Laokokok to reach out to everyone’s grandchildren, exciting and satisfying their curiosity about the world before they were born, or at least knew what was happening.

It is apparent that he is not the only one taking up the role of being the community’s living library of firsthand historical experience: yesterday.sg is a web community serving the same function as a body. It invites contributions in the same vein as Laokokok, and since it is maintained by a body of bloggers, there is no worry about lack of readership and being at a loss for new material to put up. Singas.co.uk is a similar site, with its content is mainly in pictures, variously contributed.

Along with the above sites, similar blogs dealing with the specific history behind Singapore’s landscape, such as mychewjoochiat.blogspot.com and nanyangtemple.wordpress.com, and even the music of the 60s and 70s, http://singapore60smusic.blogspot.com/, are linked directly from Laokokok’s blog.

Of course, the blog need not be about the past, and need not be directed to anyone’s grandchildren. It can just be a family blog, allowing family members to post updates, pictures, and in general help maintain the sense of clannish connection, such as or just a blog for yourself. Philip Chew’s blog, pchew-nostalgia.blogspot.com/, for example, has entries about his travels to various places as well as nostalgic ones.

The beauty of the blog is that it offers the opportunity for expression, and at least the comforting illusion that you are leaving a memoir for an unspecified future audience. Quite unfortunately, even blogs are not permanent records; on Laokokok’s blog, the link to “ANZ Military Brats Of Singapore” is down because the MSN Groups blog service has closed. Add to that the possibility that there might be some embarrassment when someone from the younger generation decides to be less than respectful about your output, blogging can be a daunting prospect.

In its defense, however, before any blog service closes it typically alerts its users and allows them to transport their blogs to other services. Still, the older generation do not have enough presence in the blogosphere to be treated as proper entities; their exclusion, perhaps self-exclusion, from the internet is a form of an exile, which in the age of cyberspace (as opposed to the real world, what some call “meatspace”) denigrates them into a kind of non-existence.

To blog, then, is a form of reclaiming citizenship as well as fulfilling the social function of the elders in a world defined, at least partially and significantly, by the internet. It promises to be rewarding, and it can be done, especially in an environment that actively encourages the older generation to do it, like the Singaporean blogosphere. If you don’t have one, and have few other outlets to share your life, perhaps it is time for an old blog(ger) to learn new tricks.