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

Media object

The Digital Photograph

The digital photograph is a frozen image, which is nowadays commonly generated by very sophisticated phone cameras, which pixel quality is improved in comparison to cameras from photographer's years ago. We can also store thousand of pictures in memory drives or in clouds online, which means they can remain in our cognitive memory as long as never before. We don't have to worry about forgetting things because thanks to the digital technology we are able to acquire knowledge almost automatically. For instance, specific past experiences from our lives can be re-projected through our senses as soon as we get into a computer's folder containing a representative selection of photographs from that life's time. However, the ubiquity of digital images is changing our memories and the way we store information 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, but if we edit an image and create an unreal event we might even be able to give memories to people of things that never happened by triggering unreal information to the brain.

How to conceive the digital photograph is also changing quickly. The effect how to present yourself to the world in the digital medias, thinking either of a private or public persona you get within a trusted group of friends or family. Having an instant access to digital captures and a big audience is heavily increasing people's desire to show up in photos, but they are simultaneously 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. We move from a conversational sharing mode to a broadcast, shifting from notion of friendship to celebrity. Photographs can become opportunities to broadly project impressions, broadening influence.

There is a technological enhanced access that eases and speeds up communication between individuals. The sense of capturing and display is a very similar thing; we lose the ability to experience something in situ. We loose the real sense of experience by spending so much time focusing in the capture and on the display, by putting a device between us and the thing we are trying to capture, we might be 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.