It’s a nicely written piece that, overall, is positive about the use of camera phones to share memories with the world. But his conclusion notes a problem: “The danger, I guess, is that we'll watch everything change through our viewfinders and then get so carried away with sharing that we forget to reflect.”
As an amateur photographer, who uses digital cameras, a film camera and, of course, camera phones, I certainly can attest to viewing some situations — too many, actually — through a viewfinder.
He writes…
“Truth is, practically anything beautiful or terrible or just slightly unusual calls for the interposition of a lens these days — stop along PCH [Pacific Coast Highway] to watch the sun set over the Pacific and you're bound to encounter passersby holding up their phones, watching the digital version.“At the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, hundreds of people packed into UCLA's Royce Hall to see Arianna Huffington interview Gore Vidal, and I watched a man watch the entire hourlong conversation on his 1-inch-square cellphone screen, snapping pictures along the way.
“Photographing the moment is only the beginning.“Next stop is dissemination, in which that experience, that memory, is transferred, at the push of a button to other cellphones, to computers, to any of the several dozen media sharing websites, joining more than 122 million photos on Flickr alone and millions of videos on Youtube.com.
“And then it spreads further still, filtering through some of the 57 million MySpace.com pages and onward through Facebook.com and Friendster.com, and the rest of the social networking universe.
“A memory for one is a memory for all; the fallibility of memory is no more. Arriving home, sweaty and satisfied after an exhilarating immigration protest — or cool and quiet after watching an auburn sunset across the sea — talking about your day becomes a different exercise than it once was.“Remembrances are no longer ambiguous collages of past and present experiences but rather the well-defined digital records sitting in front of us. We don't close our eyes to invoke memory; we open them wide to decipher the proof, the truth.
“It's clarity of one sort, though maybe blindness of another….
“Technology marches giddily forward, and it's a safe bet that cameras and other recording gadgets will proliferate further, that distribution channels will become more immediate and accessible, and that in sum, collective memory will interact with individual memory in ways we cannot yet comprehend.
In one sense, this web of interconnection is the awe-inspiring stuff of Buddhist ‘inter-being’; it conjures a thousand mystics saying in their various tongues, ‘we are all one.’ It threatens to disappear the fractious boundaries of place, time, race, sex, self even.
“But it also can be seen as rendering the moment something other than the moment, transporting us into the past and the future — anywhere but the present — and transferring our experience to everybody except the self….”
Ramifications of revolution
Camera phones are revolutionizing, as I pontificate ad nauseum, our world. I’d like to see more article like Barrie-Anthony’s that explore the ramifications.
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