The Price of a Picture

I mentioned how overuse of eBooks changed my experience with physical books. Now when physical books, it has become annoying to me to switch tasks to look up a definition. However, there is another "problem" that arises from switching to eBooks exclusively over the physical. I've noticed, in the past, that so many things about physical books changes our relationship with the story. These things include stuff like the font size. I've realized that these representations of words impact how I relate and accept the story. If the font is smaller, it's almost creates a block between me and the characters. In other words, I noticed a direct correlation associated with the size of the font and how much I enjoy the book itself. Sure there can be outliers, but it doesn't change my personal statistics. You also have the flip side of too large of words. If the words are too big, you end up flipping more pages. That changes your ability to forget that you aren't part of the story. There is a happy medium with text size.

When going digital, all of these rhetorical choices are cancelled out. On my phone, I can control the size of the text. Here, the relationship with page turning comes more into play. If I were to increase the size to my hypothetical happy medium size associated with physical books, I have to turn the pages way more often which interrupts the continuity of the story.  I have to decrease the text size and a new happy medium is found. However, with digital books, personal choices made by the publishers - text size, fonts, page color - are transferred to me. I can now experience all digital books the same way, which I wasn't allowed to do before. Now every book, so far as it is formulated correctly, can be any person's happy medium. So, is this really a problem putting the aesthetic choices into the hands of the common people?

Recently, I read an article about dying art of photography and how modern picture snapping impacts our memory of events. In this day and age, it is so easy to capture pictures. This seems like it should be a good thing. Now, we can capture all of those precious moments of and with our families and loved ones. Every single one. We can also delete them in an instant if we don't like how it was framed. How many great pictures are we really losing? In the article. The article talked about our brains ability to download (my word choice) information. It can only process so much at once. This means, in recent years with the rapid development of photography and the social stigma to constantly share these "precious" pictures with others. This is great in some respects, now we can better experience and follow the lives of those we care about, even if we can't be with them all of time. However, there is one person who misses out on the memory parade in this picture passing game. According to the article, this person is the person taking the pictures.

Since the brain can only process so much at once, the nature of memory has changed.Once upon a time, a mother would see her child doing something silly and imprint that into her memory. She would record the experience. Now, instead of the mother taking a moment to remember the experience, her brain is too busy thinking, I need a picture of this. She then pulls out her phone and takes a picture to "aid" her recall of the memory. That is good because she will need the aid. Instead of making a memory of the child, she is now making a memory about taking a picture. And what if the picture isn't quite right. The mother deletes it and continues her focus on getting the right picture instead of on her child. Is the price of "sharing" a moment too high for the damage it does to the memory?