Necessity is the mother ...
I think I first touched upon this issue eight years ago
when I questioned what happened to the social life of an elderly community when
instead of receiving concrete photographs of their grandchildren, the residents
of an old-age home such as that where my mother spent the last years of her life
received digital photos instead. At that time I even proposed the first commercial
for a handheld digital photograph viewer.
Though I don't know for sure, I always assumed that Mom wasn't the only person
in that old-age home with a personal computer, just as I also assumed that email
was fast becoming, there as well, the standard means of receiving photographs.
But even though I tried to raise the issue then, I'm not familiar with any other
attempts to deal with it since. My basic premise was that residents in a home
of that sort loved seeing photographs of their grandchildren, but that an even
greater pleasure was showing those photos to other residents who would of course
remark on how beautiful those grandchildren were. But physical photographs could
be kept in a purse, ready to be pulled out for viewing
anytime. Digital photographs, on the other hand, were still stored only on a computer,
and thus in order to view them a group of grandmothers would have to walk over
to (let's say) my mother's apartment and crowd around the computer screen. It
seemed to me then, as it still does now, that the simple move from physical to
digital would result in significant, and unexpected, changes in the social life
of the residents.
Go to: To hold in our hands.