Digital Privilege

I talked about Parasocial Relationships in a previous post and how the evolution of technology evolved so quickly to enable us to see and hear people that aren't in the same room that it was unrealistic to expect our physiological evolution to catch up to that reality in such a short space of time.

I've been thinking about how technology enables us to revisit past moments in our lives with absolute clarity and realised that we live in a time of "Digital Privilege" that arguably previous generations never experienced. Yes cameras have been around for some time, and yes home movies were relatively common for a few decades but all of those things came with a price tag that not everyone could afford.

Today you can pick up an Android phone from anywhere between £20 and £2,000 you don't have to break the bank to access the bare minimum features of a smart phone, i.e. a camera that records videos of a reasonable resolution. Even the act of recording your voice whilst possible well over a century wasn't something that was common. Even today the average person doesn't make voice recordings without video that accompanies it and even with the proliferation of podcasts available through platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud, these usually come with an alternative Youtube version where you can watch the podcast rather than just listening to it - which came first the video or the voice?

That's a rhetorical question at least as far as the technological origins are concerned, we could record and reproduce audio before we could do the same for video, and when video eventually came along it was silent at first. As was the case when discussing Parasocial Relationships in the context of this technological evolution however, this wasn't a technology that was available to all.

I had disposable cameras when I was growing up and took pictures of some moments in my life, birthdays and Christmases, various holidays and whatnot, but the habit of documenting everyday life wasn't something that seemed important to me even though it was technically possible to do. Even beyond technology whilst simple things like keeping a diary or a journal were things that I experimented with from at least my days in Primary School, it wasn't something I maintained. There was a naive trust in my seemingly infallible memory, a belief that anything important enough to remember would be remembered anyway. I knew of things like amnesia from TV shows and Movies but always though it was somewhat exaggerated. In my teenage years my Grandfather's health began to decline and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease and that reality of memory loss became a little more solidified.

My Grandfather's memory came and went with passing days. On a good day he would be "there" and present and would recount his youth and past experiences that he had whilst on bad days he was "not all there" and it was difficult to interact with him at all. Over time the bad days became more frequent until it was almost impossible to connect with him anymore. In his final years he needed round the clock supervision and for that he spent his final years in assisted living in a home that specialised in caring for people with the condition. I rarely saw him during these years, my Father would visit him alone or with his siblings.

It was also during these years when my English teacher gave me the advice that if you want to write, the one thing you have to do is never stop. Writing is like a muscle that you have to exercise, even if you don't like anything you write, you still have to do it, like a body builder if you want to achieve results you need to workout even on the days when you don't feel like it. When you don't like what you're writing it is much easier to shift whilst in motion to another topic than it is to stare at a blank page and try to start from nothing. Some days getting to the gym can be more of a struggle than the workout itself.

As an artist or a creative, don't expect the first work of art you try to create upon a canvas to be a masterpiece - advanced imaging techniques of the canvasses of some of the greatest works of art like the Mona Lisa have revealed the iterations painted on the canvas before the final piece we see with the naked eye.

I started writing with regularity when I was a teenager, but unfortunately with almost a certain futility everything I wrote during those years was lost. Once from accidentally reformatting a hard drive which also made me lose coursework I needed for one of my classes in High School - which I then spent half the night rewriting as it was due the next day. Once from a hard drive that outright died due to a power failure and never worked again, I still hold onto that one in the vain hope that one day I may find a way to recover it but that hope is slim. Many times more what I wrote was lost to moments of abandon when I decided to purge anything I didn't feel was good enough to hold onto.

This loss of data not only covers my writing over the years it also covers a lot of the photos and videos that I made documenting my life. It's odd to think but in a way this is a form of "digital dementia" amounting to the loss of data that we have otherwise come to expect to hold onto. It also didn't help that the various online services I used over the years came and went, and with them what little record existed online was also lost. I did backup some of those blogs, and the websites I hosted on Geocities, the live journals and the various social media profiles I had but most of those were on the hard drive that died.

Today I have local backups, second and third hard drives, cloud backups on Google Drive, One Drive, DropBox et al. I don't wish to tempt fate by saying it but I'd like to think it a little harder today for some of those memories to be lost.

The interesting thing about this preservation to me however goes back to that naive thought I had as a child, that I could rely on the infallible nature of my own memory to recount every detail, the irony is through digital preservation we are given the privilege of doing just that. With a video of those moments in our lives we don't have to rely on recalling every detail, we can watch and observe it for ourselves. I still have physical photos that I took when I was young and the photos my parents took when I was younger still. The earliest video I appear on is that of an Aunt's wedding that was originally on VHS but we had transferred to DVD about 15 years ago as we no longer owned a VHS player at that point. I was about 9 at the time of that wedding, as far as video is concerned there's essentially a gap of about 11 years from that point until the next video I still have of myself when I was at University.

That question remains however even now, one that it seems almost impossible to avoid being naive in answering - how much of your life should you document? How much of your day to day life and everything else that you experience might you one day wish to relive? Despite all the efforts I have made over the years to document what is relevant I still find myself looking back now on moments passed and thinking I should have made a greater effort to preserve that memory.

I won't lie, my life right now feels rather boring. There are a few huge elements of uncertainty which I have mentioned in previous posts but beyond the once-in-a-while developments my everyday life follows more or less the same routine, I don't document it because it's not interesting, the problem is the point of clarity you need to add to that statement - it's just not interesting to me right now, and the difficulty lies in trying to figure out whether it ever will be. There is of course the opposite strategy, document everything, that way your future self can decide what is important and what is not, but the process of documenting everything is exhausting.