Life and Death of Our Fondest Memories

The other day I found out how impersonal the internet and social media can be. These two great advances in the the modern age are supposed to connect people. Instead it has driven us further apart than ever before. In years past there were things called a Sunday drive. Families would climb into the family station wagon and take a drive to grandma's house, just to say "hi". It took real effort and intent to communicate along distances. A simple phone call, a heart felt hand written letter, even a causal wave from across the drive way, these were the ways people used to communicate with other people. Today we pick and choose who we befriend, who we want to be associated with, and even when (if at all)  we send a message back. To make a reference to Start Trek Voyager, it seems that society has traded in their humanity and become drones to society.

In the Star Trek universe the drones are the mindless Borg species. Each Borg, a former free thinking individual, has been altered to serve a collective and a single Queen. When modern technology is used for the right purposes it has great benefits. Research of all kinds, medical, scientific, mathematical, and so on can be done. This research has had a great benefit to society. Like the collective mind of the Borg, the internet has allowed for free thinking and a faster and smoother transfer of knowledge, this is good. The downfall of all this free flowing knowledge is the fact that some people have become so dependent on this mechanism for communication that they have forgotten or never learned how to properly communicate outside the digital realm of technology. Like a Borg who has become disconnected form the collective, some people today are lost and hopeless with out their technology.

The mindless use of technology is not limited to communication. The way we take picture now has changed. Gone are the days of thumbing through photo pages and albums and sending them off to family. Today we snap pictures with our phones and there they sit for ever. We may even post them to Facebook and expect others to look at our cute baby pictures of our kids. That is the intention but not always the case. The other day I talked to my aunt for the first time in a several years. We talked for while and mentioned pictures. I told her that I posted some to Facebook, and there the problem is. My aunt and I both seldom use Facebook and so posting pictures there is pointless.  Also taking digital pictures has added an extra step to ever seeing the pictures. Using an old 110 camera we were forced to develop the film if we wanted to see the pictures. That was it, snap the picture and develop the film. Now we snap the picture maybe even edit along the way ( which also takes away from the originality of the subject) and the picture sits in memory until we decided to look at it again. Only this time we can look at the picture on a monitor or LCD screen. We still have the ability to order prints of the pictures, but do we.

The look and feel of an actual developed picture always reminds me of times spent with my grandmother. She was the keeper of family photos. Every time I would walk into her house there would be a stack of photo prints on the table. Those were enjoyable days, now lost in time.