Recently my teenage daughter’s iPhone was out of memory, and she asked if I could format it. That wasn’t an issue, but when I went to create the backup, I noticed something strange. Over 3GB was being occupied by over 800 photos and videos that she had taken in the last two years.
“I’m backing this up,” I said, “which photos do you want me to keep?”
“All of them,” was her response.
All of them? Seriously? I mean, I get how she wanted to save the valuable ones (i.e., vacation shots of her hanging out with her awesome dad), but did she really want to keep the second string photos that never even qualified for Snapchat? Would she ever go back to that backup folder 10 years from now and think, “Hey, this is a terrific image of a blurry fingernail design, I’m so glad I kept it?”
I knew the answer was no, but I still complied with her request and kept all the photos in archive stasis. Even the fingernail ones.
This got me thinking. My generation grew up in the age of the Polaroid One-Step 600, a boxy camera that cranked out a sheet of formatted film and like magic, resolved the flashed image into a picture. This technology is antiquated by today’s standards, but still impresses me in a pleasant, nostalgic way; it literally created a cherished memory from a blank slate, bad lighting and all.
Like all cameras of that time, you had to be careful on the photos you chose to take. There was no multishooting as with today’s digital phones, and you only had one chance to get it right. The time from pushing the button to seeing the final product took minutes, long after the action was finished. Because of this, you had to be particular in the poses you selected, and out of the two dozen photos you were allowed, my guess would be that only 20% of them actually made the cut to be placed into the pre-Snapfish photo album (yes kids, we still have them if you’re interested. Ask your parents or maybe even grandparents!)
Today, the Polaroid clunkiness is just a distant memory kept alive primarily though Instagram’s logo of the SX-70. We have the luxury of being able to digitally store image after image, to see our results in near-real time and capture the moment exactly as we are experiencing it. From there, we can copy to our friends and family (and strangers) through various social media with a simple swipe. My opinion is that this is a good thing that promotes communication and knowledge sharing. Isn’t that what we want? To share our memories with others?
But as with every positive, there is also a dark side. Like everything that is simple and easy to replicate, we minimize our efforts. So unlike the Polaroid One-Step, we aren’t limited to one “good” action shot–we click our camera button over and over on that particular moment, knowing that out of the dozens of duplicate photos we are taking, we will find significant quality on at least several of them. And then, after we have the photos of the beach vacation, or concert, or wedding–we go through them one by one, picking out the ones that we think are the best. But the interesting thing is not what we decide to keep, but what happens to those photos that aren’t up to our standards. Do we delete them? Do we toss them away like we would with physical film stuck on the closet shelf during Spring Cleaning?
No, I think we do what my daughter and I chose to do. We keep everything, even the bad photos and videos. Because if we remove them, we worry that there may come a point one day in the future when we are actually longing to see that picture, including the one where a fox is munching on grass in a parking lot. In our rush to capture those moments, we are avoiding the effort to prioritize the best of these memories. We are saying that every photo counts, and even if we have videos and photos that no one–not even ourselves–will ever view, at least we had the opportunity to capture that snippet of memory from our mind. We own something that will last forever in a digital format and maybe some of it actually matters.
Unless we need to format our hard drives, of course. And even then, there’s always room in the cloud.
Digital hoarding is one of those behaviors that some psychiatrists abhor, yet one in which many of us still actively engage. Breaking away from this trend, as a 2014 Washington Post article emphasizes, is challenging but not impossible. It has to start with the realization that just because we perceive we are missing out, we are not necessarily experiencing the reality. In our quest to capture our memories through data, we may lose sight of why we come to these events. It is not the image in the viewfinder that we seek, but the experience itself. And at the end of the day, the picture in our mind–who we were with, what we saw, and how we felt–may be the one that is worth the true sharing.
What do you think? Do you perceive the mass storage of photos as detrimental something that has its own uses? I’d love to read your comments.