Do you take photos and keep those around or you just don’t use cameras? If you do preserve photos, why? Before cameras were invented, most people (who couldn’t paint or pay a painter) had experiences and events only in their memories. You could follow that for photos and videos too. Or get a camera that shows the photo you took for a few seconds and then erase it permanently.
I’m not trolling either. The point is not whether you value something to look back on in the future or not. It’s that a lot of people value that and would use a service that aligns with those needs. Chats can also have photos and videos that someone else shared. It’s not easy or clear to many people that they should save or offload those from an (unreliable) chat app if they want to look back at those later.
actually, that happens a lot, at least before the advent of the internet. Physical photos are not always available, and people's memories fade. This is why a lot of people still think of information in the old way - as time goes by, it might fade.
I think it depends on the content. With family photos, I'd rather have them public then lose them. For the public, it's likely not that interesting, but for me they are invaluable.
I think you're partly right, but I think another aspect of it is how new all this technology is. We completely dropped the "old" way of doing things (carefully take photo, get it developed, store it in an album) and replaced it with the current way (take lots of photos, upload them all to some service, share with friends) in a decade or less. Most people simply haven't accumulated all that much history on these services yet. It'll be interesting to see what our personal histories look like once this technology has been around for a few more decades. Things like the Facebook timeline may become increasingly important, or we may all abandon curated histories because (as you say) information is so easily retrieved now.
It's definitely something that deaths and similar events make you think about, but ultimately, I also find myself asking if it would be used at all. And if it was, would it be beneficial?
I have thousands of family slide photos from my grandparents. This is unusual, but they were big photography fans. Nobody looked at them for at least a decade. But about 10 years ago I had access to a nice scanner, so I digitized a few hundred of them, so that we could look at them more easily. Now I have thousands of slide photos nobody has looked at in two decades, hundreds of digitized versions nobody has looked at in one decade, and a handful of ones we printed or such that get looked at more regularly. I think quantity is overrated, and it just becomes write-only-memory. I still take hundreds of photos for myself every year, but I doubt my kids will ever look at them for more than a few hours, max.
And I think there's something to be said for the impermanence of memory for helping people move on with their lives. I thought I was going to die a few years ago - I didn't, which is great, obviously, but if I had, I wouldn't have wanted those who loved me to still be dwelling on me today.
Snapchat is basically the app recognition of this idea that not everything is worth saving, that for 99.99% of stuff the value today far, far outweighs any value in the future. Shame it's such a hard concept to monetize, I guess.
(I say this, but I'm not immune to the temptation, either. If you ask the people in my life, they'd definitely tell you they wish I'd follow my own advice around "remember, you're taking pictures for yourself, not for other people, and don't prioritize your pictures of others over other people themselves." :| )
3 years ago if someone took a picture it wouldn’t be seen by anyone else (or very few)
Today it’s shared on the internet, not only seen by dozens of the photographers friends, but linked via face recognition to you even though you live the other side of the world and was on holiday.
Having the physical photos still didn't mean we saved the context and relevance surrounding those images.
I've got boxes of photos from my Mom and Dad and Grandparents. For the most part, they don't have dates or captions. If I don't recognize a face, it's just random imagery that are, for the most part, just noise to my generation. If we knew why something was relevant, that'd be a different story.
If you can record your voice and retell the story behind an image, that could be golden to the people in your life. I only captured a couple of these recordings (just using my cell phone to record), and they're wonderful to listen to.
That's all well and good, and I don't think many people are disputing the value of having more and better memories of loved ones.
The trouble is in resolving that against the kind of culture that has fostered things like the "creepshots" subreddit.
Smartphones (and GoPros) have already shown the value of being able to film and share more of our lives, but they've also shown the downsides of having our graceless moments broadcast to the world, or the many events that are now impossible to enjoy in a sea of smartphones held aloft, or, if you're an attractive woman, far more of you put online for other people to gawk at.
Until those abuses are resolved somehow, people are going to resist having a little camera attached to everyone's face.
True, but it was also relatively harder for pictures to become famous, and there wasn't massive face recognition systems to use the data in unexpected ways. Also, a lot more people are taking pictures, and though I'm not art-gatekeeping, it's fair to say that at least the motivational context for most photography is different now than it was historically.
That a great point which is missed by so many technologists. It's impossible to know if what you created today will be important later, be it a photo, a blog post, a voice recording, or an email. I've found invaluable emails in my Gmail inbox written a decade ago.
Maybe that silly snapchat pic you took today with your cousin is the last picture you'll have of her. Who knows.
My point was more that today I have a phone in my pocket permanently, digital photos are free so ill take a picture of anything. In the 50s there were financial and convenience barriers to photography, however small.
Plus these photos have survived. My modern photo of an un notable thing probably wont survive, a picture of a notable thing probably will.
I agree that people take an abundance of photos and videos that they rarely or never look at them again. I have short term memory so taking the occasional photo here and there helps bring back memories though.
The album is only relevant if you create your albums based on context. I don't take that many pictures any more and so most of my albums are based on dates. For example I have an album that contains all pictures from January 2011, there's about 15 pictures in it and they are from 3 different events. Having access to the album does't provide any additional benefit to the people in the pictures because only two or three of the other 14 pictures would be relevant to them in the first place.
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