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Sunday, February 24, 2002
22:43 - The New Family Bible

(top) link
Well, I'd love to have been able to find the original text of this article that I heard read tonight on "Five Minutes", part of TechNation on NPR; but while they said with great confidence that the full text of all "Five Minutes" articles would be available at siliconvalley.com, I've just spent the past half hour combing that site to find any mention of "Five Minutes" or TechNation or NPR, to no avail whatsoever.

So, to ad-lib it...

The columnist talked about how she hadn't yet been bitten yet by the "digital camera bug"-- a) because the technology isn't quite up to the same snuff as film prints, and b) because computers crash. Who'd trust their family history to a computer?

She dwelt on the issue of family photos being a seminal feature of our concepts of our lives. People her age, she said, only had a few grainy black-and-white photos of them as babies; the only context that identified the featured baby as her was the clothes worn by the other people in the photos; the baby may as well have been clip-art. But today, kids are growing up with all their childhoods fully archived-- photographed in full color, blown up to poster size, videotaped, recorded in all ways imaginable-- "they're media darlings," she said.

And yet we want to have those physical photos locked away in boxes. The physical reality of photos that we can lift and that take up space in the closet reassures us.

And yet, as she says in the wrap-up of the article, it's up to every generation to preserve its legacy by embracing the technologies of the next generation. So she may have to bite the bullet and jump into the digital photography world. And here's the bit that I found interesting:

A classic demographical experiment is to ask a person, "Your house is on fire. You can run in and grab one personal item. What will it be?"

Up till the early part of the 20th century, the response was always "The family Bible."

After that, it was "The family photo album."

And as she closes the article, we have passed another milestone: How many of us would answer, "My computer"?

I would.

Because I don't have any non-digital photos... or indeed much of anything of value that isn't on my computer. I have geek toys, but they all juggle data (whether photos, MP3s, Palm contacts, or DV video), and that data is on the computer now. Everything else I have... well, I could always get new ones.

I wonder how significant to the human condition the answer to that hypothetical question is? Since there have been so few changes to the common response in recorded history, one would think it's pretty darn fundamental...

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