As I get ready to lead a discussion about the social impact of the web here at Stream07, John sent me this article about the changes in the way we handle our memories. Pretty deep and intimate things are being reshaped by technology, and it might not be for the better.

Before the presence of cameras and the like, humans passed on knowledge through storytelling, intertwining personal experience with a sense of place and time. They created visual landscapes through words, art, and the objects around them. This storytelling codified a shared sense of experience, bringing the audience into a collective understanding of their culture and environment. […]

In our frenzy to safeguard our memories in the online world, we have removed the intimacy of storytelling. We have made the web, not each other, the major source of shared experiences, knowledge, and opinions (often not even our own).

Link

Ask a hardcore Flickr user how his wedding went, and he’ll tell you “great, check my photo stream!”. His memories are stored in an efficient and rich way (i.e. high definition, always available pictures), but outside of his/her intimate memory system.

Digital cameras tend to make us focus more on capturing moments than on experiencing them. It’s a slow and invisible transition, but it has deep consequences on our capacity to refer to memories. We are outsourcing our stories to computers, simply keeping the pointers in our heads.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 2:34 pm and is filed under society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.