Digital pics
Digital pictures contain so much more than just the pic. Also, storing where and when it was taken. This allows me to know I took this one a year and two days ago to capture the blooming of this front yard plant. I also captured the nearby lilacs with the temporary blue-violet blooms. Their window is quite short, filling the yard with their flowers and perfume for only a few appreciated days.
Last year, by this time, I believe our spring break and prom were already over with. At least, it seems the way I remember it. I could probably check a couple more pics and correctly relate THAT timeline also. Kids nowadays do not have the “luxury” that we had of letting some actions and performances of life fade away into comfortable nostalgia: once it’s on the internet, it’s there forever…somewhere. (Only a couple of us know about your digression, J&^%) Many are placing their thoughts, acts, triumphs and the occasional fopaux “right out there” daily, forever? etched in the world’s electronic memory. Where one mistake counteracts all the “good” deeds one has done up until that point.
Many young people now may have never been truly “alone”. They’ve always had the looming presence of their friends and enemies right there in our electronic umbilical cords. A friend related a student Twittering? texting? Messaging? that she was bored. Studies show boredom can be a good thing. Many times poems get written, projects get planned, quandaries get solved, crafts are developed, thoughts, sometimes lofty, form…when one is bored.
We older ones, who still remember a time before computers and technology laced through almost every aspect of our lives, might sometimes appear like those “natives” of movie and TV lore who feared having their picture taken would capture their souls. Humor us. Even we have to admit the positive aspects of progress should outweigh the negative—most of the time. But we all must also remember scientific advancement always surges ahead of eventual stabilizing, necessary ethics. As the coaches say: no pain, no gain. Which puts us back at this picture of a blooming plant, easily taken and (beneath the surface) catalogued with the data that, moments ago, instigated my four paragraphs of extrapolation which I might have just etched on the earth’s electronic memory somewhere…permanently.