Extra Blog 2

So I know we are supposed to respond to our experiences at the Mayflower in these extra blogs, but, unfortunately, we did not go this week, and I also have not had the pleasure of meeting my partner at the Mayflower, Sylvia, so I would not really have anything to write about at this point in the process.

I will instead write about something I thought of this week about our use of photography as an inherently digital and technological generation. Our generation and/or young persons of our age rarely prints photographs at all, unless for a specific purpose such as a collage, or a photo book assigned by teachers for a class (per se), or the like. Instead of buying photo albums and laboriously spend hours putting pictures in a particular order in that album (something I always truly enjoyed as a child - it helped me better relive the experience, and in turn, I think, helped me better solidify the memories in my mind), we create digital albums on online sites or computer photo programs such as Facebook and iphoto. These programs take away the physical aspect of sorting and organizing photographs in any sort of actual book. Iphoto even organizes them for you, putting them in order of date and time. Heck, it even recognizes the faces of people in photographs and tells you who is in each picture. Facebook is similar, though instead of housing all of your pictures, there is some editing process in which we decide which pictures to post on the web, but this still results in an entirely digital and technological version of our memories and the many images we have capture.
Most of my childhood is laid out somewhere in actual physical photographs, many of which I put together myself, something I loved doing. The older I get, the more I put pictures on Facebook to create an album or share them rather than printing them out and creating a photo album. It is expensive to get pictures printed, especially when you can just post them for free. The more I create these Facebook and iphoto albums the more I think about how I will never be able to access these pictures, and in turn many of the memories that go along with them, when Facebook ceases to exist. Friends' pictures disappear when they delete their Facebook page, Facebook will eventually go out of style, or I will decide I am simply too old to be plastering the internet with all of my experiences and memories (I expect to grow out of Facebook in the not-so-distant future). What will be left them? When I am sixty years old and I want to look at pictures of my seemingly hapless and radiant youth, there will be only digital versions of my memories; there will be no physical representation of those photographs. This kindof scares me! I know that my memories and pictures probably won't be lost, in that harddrives do not tend to irreparably crash all that often, but I think there is something inherently sad in not being able to take out a photo album and sit down on the couch surrounded by family members and show off these pictures. I look at my facebook albums and feel that something is missing, that something has been lost in this transition from the actual photograph to the digital photograph. Plus, at this point, it would be very difficult to print out years worth of pictures and cry to create physical photo albums because of the vast number of pictures that have accumulated over the years. This feeling will merely intensify as I get older and have more pictures, it will not lessen. When I am old and I want to show my grandchildren what my life used to be like, how will I do that? I guess I might just be traditional in my views on this issue, but once Facebook no longer exists (something that is bound to happen), so many of my pictures or pictures I've been "tagged" in will cease to exist as well. How is the digital age prepared to deal with this? Just look at them on a computer? I do not know...but there is something missing from that, something important.