Digital Cameras and Lost Childhood Memories
Posted on Thursday June 22, 2006 at 11:56pm.
On the local evening news several months ago, a self-appointed expert was warning us of the danger of digital cameras. A similar story ran on a different station last month.
Our poor children, apparently, aren’t going to have memories of their childhood, because too many people are using digital cameras instead of traditional film cameras. The reporter nodded seriously while the expert flipped through a photo album, telling us it was a shame that our children would not be able to do the same when they grew up. He offered statistics as proof that people just weren’t using the old cameras. Of course, he’s right that people are using digital cameras instead of the old film ones, but so what?
When I consider how many "slides" my father took during my childhood, now sitting in a box somewhere, that no one will ever view, I can't get worked up just because some digital pictures will be lost to crashed hard drives. Some people will learn painful lessons about backing up their files, to be sure. But in total these losses might be offset by other pictures not lost to fire or flood, because they existed online somewhere. And these losses are certainly outweighed by the increase in total photos shot per person.
People are taking more pictures than ever--far more pictures--now that they don’t have to worry about wasting film (no, I don't have any data on this, but it must be true). They are ending up with far more pictures that they actually like. Many of these pictures are in albums in the computer or on CD and can be looked at on the screen. It isn’t clear to me that our children are being deprived of memories simply because the photo album they view is on a screen instead of being a physical object.
And plenty of these pictures end up being printed. Online services like shutterfly.com print out just the shots that you like at low prices. My wife is compiling physical photo albums at an unprecedented rate. The local news need not fear for my son’s childhood memories.
All of this seems obvious to me, and probably to you. But once again the experts and the journalists had no idea how the technology was being used.
The desire to have pictures of our children cannot be wiped away by a computer.
Our poor children, apparently, aren’t going to have memories of their childhood, because too many people are using digital cameras instead of traditional film cameras. The reporter nodded seriously while the expert flipped through a photo album, telling us it was a shame that our children would not be able to do the same when they grew up. He offered statistics as proof that people just weren’t using the old cameras. Of course, he’s right that people are using digital cameras instead of the old film ones, but so what?
When I consider how many "slides" my father took during my childhood, now sitting in a box somewhere, that no one will ever view, I can't get worked up just because some digital pictures will be lost to crashed hard drives. Some people will learn painful lessons about backing up their files, to be sure. But in total these losses might be offset by other pictures not lost to fire or flood, because they existed online somewhere. And these losses are certainly outweighed by the increase in total photos shot per person.
People are taking more pictures than ever--far more pictures--now that they don’t have to worry about wasting film (no, I don't have any data on this, but it must be true). They are ending up with far more pictures that they actually like. Many of these pictures are in albums in the computer or on CD and can be looked at on the screen. It isn’t clear to me that our children are being deprived of memories simply because the photo album they view is on a screen instead of being a physical object.
And plenty of these pictures end up being printed. Online services like shutterfly.com print out just the shots that you like at low prices. My wife is compiling physical photo albums at an unprecedented rate. The local news need not fear for my son’s childhood memories.
All of this seems obvious to me, and probably to you. But once again the experts and the journalists had no idea how the technology was being used.
The desire to have pictures of our children cannot be wiped away by a computer.
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- Digital Cameras and Lost Childhood Memories
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