I've confessed, probably many more times than merit counting, to a rather
close relationship with physical objects. The clutter on my desk should make
that ... well, if not crystal clear, at least obvious. Agonizing over making
the decision to throw away even the most insignificant of objects is further
proof. But that doesn't mean that in my daily life I haven't made a substantial
move toward becoming overwhelmingly digital. Though even as I write this there
are stacks of paper all around me, our home doesn't have a functional printer.
This is primarily due to the fact that I long ago stopped feeling the need for
a print-out version of anything. My adoption of just about everything digital
has actually become the source of an ongoing family feud. I alluded to this
two months ago in a rare act of hanging dirty laundry
in public. The gist of the matter is that though I'm certainly capable of sitting
down on the sofa with Hila and thumbing through a photo album, I'm also more
than comfortable viewing photos on the computer screen. Tzippi, on the other
hand, is convinced that a "real" photograph is something you can hold
in your hands and stick into an album.
I suppose I can understand her. She is, after all, the mother,
and assumes that at least one of her roles is the transmission of tradition.
We may not sit around the fire and tell stories like our ancestors, but we certainly
continue to transmit our culture - partially via the schools, partially on the
street corner, often around the dinner table, and also on the sofa - turning
the pages of family photo albums. We point out family members our children may
not remember (or even met), explaining who they are. We instill "memories"
of family events that they never attended, and much more. I have no doubt that
we can do this around the computer screen as well, but I can't really argue with
Tzippi who feels that this doesn't have the same value,
and that it doesn't contribute to bonding as much as sitting together.
Technical solutions exist that permit us to be digital and
still sit on the sofa. We can, for instance, purchase coffee table photo viewers,
or digital picture frames. We can upload our photos to these and then hold them
in our laps and browse through the photos in much the same way we view an album
today. I haven't yet tried out any of these, but I trust that they include various
skimming functions that permit us to see perhaps twenty photos at once, and
then choose which we want to see in a lager photo, moving backward or forward
in the "album" once we've found a sequence we'd like to view. As promising
as these may be, however, my guess is that they have very quickly become a niche
market for the very simple reason that the newest generation of iPods and their
imitators offers pretty much the same thing, along with numerous additional
possibilities. And yet iPods and the like are very clearly "personal"
systems while it would seem that digital picture frames attempt to answer
a need for group viewing, something that an iPod
not only doesn't try to do - it almost denies the need for it. They're part
of an ongoing march toward the personalization of experience. When we were in
public places yet covered our ears with earphones and listened to what we
wanted to hear, something significant may have been happening, but it was also
something that people quite readily accepted. The jury is still out on this
one, but I get the feeling that the personalization of photograph viewing (which
might appear to be considerably more personal to begin with) may not be meeting
the same degree of acceptance that personalized music did.
Although on the one hand the digitization of photographs
may be contributing to the personalization of memory, on another it's causing
a redefinition of the social sofa upon which we sit to view those photos. Only
a few years back email was the primary conduit for the transmission of photos,
and receiving them was basically like receiving a package that we unwrapped
- by ourselves. It wasn't particularly different from receiving the traditional
holiday greeting card that included a review of the preceding year, along with
an up-to-date photo of the family sending it. Today, sites like Flickr and Picasaweb
have redefined the sharing experience. Rather than
something being sent us, we're invited to partake in the uploaded photos. We
may still be acting as individuals, but when we view the uploaded photos we're
defining ourselves as part of a group. Some people
find this new reality confusing and undesirable, while others can immediately
identify how it might be useful to them. I often sit with a 75 year old woman
whom I help learn to use her computer and the internet. She's got lots of things
she wants to share with her children and grandchildren, but they visit only
rarely. So when she adds a photo to her Picasaweb album and lets her children
and grandchildren know about this, it's almost like sitting
on the sofa with them. There may be value in viewing photographs alone,
but it's clear that she would prefer to do so with others, and uploading an
album (and sometimes even getting responses to the photos there) has proven
itself to be very satisfying. When we weren't spread out around the world this
need didn't present itself. Now that we are, we realize that rather than atomizing
relationships, the a-synchronous viewing of photos actually strengthens them.
The continually broadening sense of comfort that we feel
toward digitality doesn't, of course, divorce us from the physical world. There's
no reason to assume that the two realms should be mutually exclusive, or that
the digital should overtake (or overwhelm) the physical. We read both on screen
and on paper, and in this particular case, it would appear that our attachment
to paper is one of expedience - we simply don't yet have digital books which
we can comfortably curl up in bed with to read. But will the same thing be true
about photographs? Will handheld digital devices - devices that today are readily
available - make viewing printed photographs only a choice of expedience, or
is our ability to handle a photograph an essential quality of our appreciation
of it? Is there some particular quality of memory that demands a physical attachment
to something? "Virtual" environments are gaining in popularity. Do visitors
to these environments feel a need for "physical"
objects in order to feel at home in them? Do residents of Second Life collect
virtual physical mementos that they can hold in their virtual hands? Would being
able to do this create for them a greater sense of belonging, or of self? I'm
still far from answering these questions, but in the meantime, Tzippi received
a large envelope of printed photographs, and, as expected, promptly started
arranging them in albums, and sat down contentedly on the sofa with Hila to
view them. I see nothing wrong with that.
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