The boundaries are blurred between work and leisure, home and abroad ? and we become curators of our memories' raw material
At one point in Chris Marker's 1983 film Sans Soleil, his narrator wonders how anyone remembers anything without photographing or filming. More recently, Paul Theroux told the Telegraph that he preferred to travel without a camera since it made him less observant and interfered with his memory.
While packing our bags during the holiday season the question doesn't even arise of whether to take a camera or not. The decision has been taken for us by the mobile phones and tablet computers that will accompany us to our often Wi-Fi-connected getaways, like stowaway memoirists reporting to our holiday blogs or social networking sites. The nostalgic urge to send dispatches is even enhanced by the retro appeal of being able to send physical postcards of our photographs to those back home, with apps such as Shoot It! or Simply Postcards!.
The supposedly downtime, time out, of holidays, now joins the real-time of news reportage, with the two activities sometimes converging when holidaymakers get caught up in natural disasters, terrorist outrages, or civil unrest and find themselves producing eyewitness reportage.
The tools are now always there in our pocket or beach bag to help us interact with our experiences abroad. It often isn't even clear where "abroad" is, when home is wherever one's iPhone is. But, with so much real-time interaction, where is the detachment and delay of Marker's filmed travel of the 1980s, Theroux's literary reflection, or the revelry of pondering the world stoked up by a suitcase of summer reading, often related to the holiday destination chosen?
With the boundaries of work and leisure, home and abroad blurred, maybe the still point around which the compass of digital lives spins continues to be the physical experience of our surroundings and those around us. And, it is in relation to that experience that our memories fluidly make sense of that experience over a period of time. If so, perhaps we should think of ourselves as curators of our memories' raw material, in the form of photographs, videos, tweets and other material. The curatorial evolution of the web is marked by the proliferation of sites such as Storify. The latter invites us to become authors of our and others' content by going one step further and telling stories with the traces of experience we record on our cameras, phones, tweets and blogs. I would say that is what memory is largely about.
In this context, technology pundit and writer Bill Thompson, serendipitously tweets me that he "would never be without a camera on holiday or elsewhere, but careful to use it to complement and not replace the experience captured. If the thing I remember is taking the photograph, then I'm doing it wrong." He follows up by reminding me that only with hindsight, after the necessary delay and reflection, do our photographs allow us to access our memories.
After the boom in production announcing the arrival of the digital age last century, I look forward to a spirit of conservation. Photography and holidays are there to help us remember who we are and give us experiences worth recalling. It has been pointed out by others before that we are all tourists now, except exiles and refugees. This is in spite of Theroux's amusing attempt, as a traveller, to avert the risk of being mistaken for a lowlier species. Whether native, tourist or exalted traveller, pack your camera but lead with your eyes, mind, and heart. Happy holidays and memories.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/17/digital-media-holiday-memory
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