Is Your Hard Drive Worth More Than Your Life?

Yesterday was my son’s fourth birthday. Since summer in Germany implies simply a lighter shade of grey, we went to an indoor playground, where the kids can bounce off the walls without breaking their necks (just, perhaps, their arms and legs). My son is gorgeous and, like any proud parent, 90% of my photos from these past four years are of him. But on this year’s birthday, I took no photographs, filmed no videos, wrote no play-by-play blog entry about his experience. For once, no technology mediated the space between father and son.

Perhaps since the advent of snapshot photography, parents have been faced with the choice between capturing a moment and experiencing it. I remember my own parents watching from behind the all-seeing eye of the VHS camcorder or the viewfinder of a new Polaroid as I acted my role as the one of the three old wise men in the school play, or attempted to be the next Ivan Lendl during my tennis matches. But today, with the proliferation of pocket-sized digital cameras and picture phones, the technology for image capture is always at hand, transforming even the most mundane moment into a photo-op. And because these devices don’t require the additional costs of film and processing, parents no longer have to choose their moments carefully. We can – and do – take hundreds of pictures, simply hoping for a good one. It is in the interest of manufacturers and service providers that we use these products often, raising revenue through data access fees, file transfers, and upgrades. It is up to us to know when to put them down. This constant access to technology requires that we set our own limits – limits which, in the past, were dictated by the things themselves.

This constant access to technology requires that we set our own limits – limits which, in the past, were dictated by the things themselves."

It is interesting to witness the influence of technology on the way cultures curate their own experience. Before the presence of cameras and the like, humans passed on knowledge through storytelling, intertwining personal experience with a sense of place and time. They created visual landscapes through words, art, and the objects around them. This storytelling codified a shared sense of experience, bringing the audience into a collective understanding of their culture and environment. As the stories were passed on, every teller became a part of the tale – rendering history subjective, reality shared.

In our frenzy to safeguard our memories in the online world, we have removed the intimacy of storytelling. We have made the web, not each other, the major source of shared experiences, knowledge, and opinions (often not even our own). In earlier days, storytelling allowed families to create a sort of shared mythology in which all were involved, the creativity of the telling as exciting as the story itself. Consider a family on holiday: nobody sees exactly the same thing; each looks at a given subject from a different point of view, and from that they share and experience something together. When that family looks at the photos from their holiday, they are presented with reminders of the million little stories that only a family can tell. What’s implied by the photos is more important than what is captured in them.

With gigabytes of storage and super zoom, with blogs and message boards, I believe we have lost some of that closeness of the family identity, some of that creativity. We have become so focused on capturing the facts – who was there, what was said – that we have forgotten the pleasures and benefits of creating a subjective oral history. Rather than share within our families, we have become too focused on sharing with the world.

Is it possible that our children may begin to consider the technology in our hands more important than the people who are using it?"

This was an important realization for me, as a father. I can imagine the number of children growing up today who see not the face of their mother or father, but the back of a mobile device, the front of a camera. I’m sure it must be scary. And I am sure that it must form a sort of psychological wall between parents and kids. We form attachments, as children, to that which we see before us. Is it possible that our children may begin to consider the technology in our hands more important than the people who are using it?

As designers, we can work towards a solution to these problems by seeking alternate paradigms for the capture and display of personal experience, moving beyond the 4:3 screen and its accompanying suite of digital devices. By re-exploring our modes of display, might we find a way to create locally-shared experiences for a family? Can we bridge that gap between generations with a dynamic, shared digital experience, the way a family has fun on a holiday? Well, I don’t know. But till that time, I’m going to keep my hands off that damn camera and make sure that I’m part of our family’s history.