This weekend I went home and noticed that my family’s fridge was covered in old family photos. We started a “Wall of Shame” over the summer — who has the ugliest and most hilarious photos as a kid (if anyone was wondering, my sister is winning).
Going through all these old photos is really making me realize how few photos I have printed out ever since I bought my college laptop. Two and a half years of college and I maybe have a hundred pictures printed.
In this time, I have traveled to 10 countries, had six new cousins added to my family and have gone to lots of college parties — not one photo printed.
My parents are always giving me heat about how I need to save these memories and make them concrete because you never know what is going to happen. Yes, I have my computer backed up on an external hard drive but it actually would be pretty easy to lose all my photos forever.
What I am wondering — am I the only person missing tangible items?
I understand and completely support that we are in the digital age. Our generation is technologically based. Has anyone seen the YouTube video where the baby doesn’t know how to turn a magazine page because she is used to an iPad? I find that video incredibly sad and not one bit cute.
Reading books was one of the best parts of my childhood. Now, kids are going to be looking back and saying, ‘Wow, that iPad was just the best way to fall asleep at night … looking at that glowing screen really put me to sleep.’
I think that progression is good but it doesn’t mean that we need to forget everything else.
Photos are an amazing way to save and share memories, and flicking through them on the computer is just not the same.
In addition to our new way of photo sharing on Facebook, how weird is it that we have this desire to take photos of EVERYTHING? Out to dinner with friends, instead of taking one photo of the group every person there needs to have a copy and at least two tries in case the first one didn’t look perfect. Tangent over.
Some objects, like the CD and VHS (yes, the CD is being phased out as we know it) reach their peak and as a society we progress. But books and photos should be and can be saved! The new Macbook Pro doesn’t even have a CD drive! That is a pretty amazing step forward but nobody is inventing the next photograph.
If it’s a money issue, a lot of the time you can get books cheaper from Amazon than you can buying them from your Kindle online store. Ordering photos on Walgreens.com, you can get prints for as cheap as $.09 a photo.
I’m not saying that everyone needs to forget this technology kick, but let’s make sure to remember that not everything that is old is worthless.
