Someone once told me...
by Elena Campus; Mar 13, 2009
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….that the Internet is reducing human relationships to superficial and impersonal interactions. Mario Cacciottolo, a BBC online journalist, thinks different. With his website someoneoncetoldme he hauled in the Net people’s thoughts, feelings and memories.
The idea of Someone Once Told Me is simple: black and white photographs; a new one every day; each person writes a message of something that someone once told them.
And like every brilliant idea, it came to his mind as a sudden and spontaneous inspiration. One day, after receiving an e-mail from a friend, Mario visualised her holding a board upon which was written the message.
The image looked incredibly powerful and strong.
A good intuition, an old camera in his hands and lot of imagination and curiosity and SOTM was than conceived.
The website collects by now around five hundreds pictures of people from all around the world, but mostly London based, who hold up a large piece of white paper upon which they have written a sentence that someone once told them and that for a reason or another had made an impression on them and has stuck in their mind since then.
Browsing people’s lives
Storytelling has existed as long as humanity has had language.
In its earliest form storytelling consisted of traditional stories passed from generation to generation and survived solely by memory.
In the Internet age storytelling takes the form of countless stories that every day are born and die in the web.
Mario Cacciottolo found a way to merge the ancient flavour of handed down stories with the tools offered by the new technologies.
Since spoken words fly away, written words remain, SOTM becomes a gallery of moments in people’s lives that otherwise would have gone lost.
SOTM is also an exciting and moving experience for the reader. When you look at the pictures you create a story yourself, trying to figure out the context in which the sentence was told, why, and how it shaped that person’s life.
The good news for you, new Londoners, is that you can be part of this project! You can either contact Mario and have your picture taken or send it directly to him in Your SOTM section.
If you were told a sentence in any particular language there’s even the Foreign Language Friday for you.
Don’t hesitate then, give it a go!
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