User:Francg/expub/media-writing/media-object

Media object

The Digital Photograph

The frozen image. Phone uses cameras that are nowadays more sophisticated than cameras from photographers years ago. We can store thousand of pictures in memory drives or online, which means they can remain in our memory as long as never before. The ubiquity of digital images is changing our memories, the way we store information about the past or construct narratives about the past. We can never have a pure memory about an event, we are always reconstructing our memories and events according to information. The interesting thing about frozen images is that they show a specific selection of things that happened. We might be able to give memories to people of things that never happened, by triggering unreal information. Technology assisted life long learning.

The effect how to present yourself to the world, thinking of a private persona rather than a public persona you get within a trusted group of friends or family. People wanna show up in photos, concerned for their appearance, managing photos in the digital World is becoming an obsessive experience, we crave the active capturing as it represents life in itself.

Having an instant access to digital captures and a big audience. We move from a conversational sharing mode to a broadcast, shifting from notion of friendship to celebrity. Photographies can be then opportunities to broadly project impressions. There is a technological enhanced access. The sense of capturing and display is a very similar thing, we loose the ability to experience something in-situ, our motivation to a potential audience. We loose the real sense of experience by spending so much time focusing in the capture and the display. By putting a device between us and the thing we are trying to capture, we are getting in the way of truly experiencing in life.

We can put off the past into the future. We have to take choices whether we keep or not a picture, constantly deleting photographs (whether is good or not). Can we manipulate which images goes into the happy times in the future? Which is the record that goes forward? We are making decisions all the time, consciously or unconsciously. Spending life trying to find the best capture.

Many of us self-curate, selecting carefully which images goes out to the World, where we go or see are part of a personal marketing that documents a false reality of a particular self. Can we be even sure that those self-curated images did actually happen? That smile will remind you what a wonderful time you were having.

Relying on images might validate our memory, but what about those events we have no representations from? We don’t necessarily need the pictures to ensure anything has happened to us, but we can speculate how we move towards more photographic representations of our lives, will be less confident remembering those events in which there isn’t a documentary evidence.