Graphic Memory

Dave Pell owns one fascinating mind. I like the way he thinks. He's nailed it in a great post about the ubiquity of connected cameras and what our ability to record everything is doing to our minds. He got me thinking and I would take it one step further.

Once upon a time we relied on our OEM wetware [brains] to record our vacations, birthday parties, weddings and graduations. Then we turned to cameras, which were great. The financial and technological limits imposed by film and development gave us just the right access to a perfect record of an event. We selected what we captured and waited till we consumed it.

As we waited to get the photos back from the developer, our memories ripened and the glossy 4x6 prints became talismans. Bright kodachrome touchstones traced in white scalloped edging served as hyperlinks. Just like hyperlinks,

when we clicked them, the snapshot disappeared and our mind accessed the content symbolized. It sought and found persistence of memory held in the amber of our being. Content deeper and richer in mind color and meaning and feeling than ever a Polaroid was. Content we could connect to because it was us. Emotion recollected in tranquility.

Now we are breaking this synergy. In our destructive quest for more|better|faster we have good cameras synced-wireless to databases strung in the cloud. We are surrounded by anthropologists properly equipped and so burdened to document our race. All is record and document. All are analyzed and scrutinized. There is no hope of forgetting now.

But terribly worse, the more we catalog, the more the hope of remembering is disappearing.

As a thing happens we review the picture of it on a screen. When we are old, and we hold the screen to flip through the pictures, the talisman will call back to itself, a broken hyperlink, a beautiful recursive time token. The only memory left, the only content triggered by seeing these pictures is memory of taking these pictures, and maybe just one more, to get it right.

The contemporary digital screen bound and commented snapshot is a symbol of symbolism, a reminder reminding we can't remember. Yet I'm remembering.

Anyone older than Facebook remembers remembering like it used to be. It is not far gone. It is why Facebook has comments for every photo. We are shaken and our souls torn when we look at photos of dear ones and we don't link through to deep content of love and memory. Comments are a running scared dodge to build content around the thing itself, since we have none.  Comments are terrified souls grasping at the thinnest of pretexts attempting to create meaning in empty places. And failing. At least failing to get back to what we know. And what we remember.

From Dave Pell's piece "This is You on Smiles", he talks about what happened at his son's surfing-themed birthday party as Dave found himself taking pictures the moment they hit the beach:

...And because he is a child of the digital age, my son followed nearly every snap of the camera with the same request: “Can I see the picture?”

Maybe it was a bad angle. Maybe I didn’t get his good side. Maybe he just didn’t have that surfer vibe. Whatever it was, the photo wasn’t all that cool. Given time to reflect (even the few days I used to get between my own childhood birthdays and my mom picking up a set of 4x6 prints at the local pharmacy), my son probably would’ve developed a version of that day that had him riding a giant a wave, looking like a cross between Laird Hamilton and Eddie Vedder.

Instead, he pretty much looked like a landlocked boy on a beach-bound surfboard who was suffering from a rare — but particularly punishing — bad hair day.

The instant my son looked at the image, his imagination-driven perception of himself was replaced by a digital reproduction of the moment he had just experienced. He had a few seconds, not nearly long enough, to create his own internal version of what that moment looked — and by extension felt — like.

Dave's son was three years old at the time.

My own children are growing up in a ubiquity of screens. I don't know what to do or how to stop it. The tragedy of typing this on a screen and you reading it on a screen does not escape me. There are screens in screens. But the first step is admitting you have a problem. I have, and maybe I won't end up like R...till next time...