Erasing the present
Joanne Wane argues that with the shift to digital we're at risk of not leaving behind much of a photographic record of our lives. Yeah, it's a bit alarmist, since the number of photographs taken each year with both digital and film is massive, but it is true that photos taken during the Civil War are more likely to make it to the next century than those pics you just snapped with your cameraphone:
[W]hile the public and the professionals have embraced this magical technology that allows pictures to be viewed in an instant and transmitted around the globe, concern is being raised that our pictorial history is at risk. Few of the images taken on digital cameras are ever printed out, which means many are permanently lost when the file is deleted or damaged. Even if prints are made, the cheaper commercial models currently used for family snapshots reproduce at significantly lower quality and have less depth than film, especially when enlarged. Imagine, for example, the exhilarated couple who snap off some shots on their mobile phone to announce the arrival of their newborn baby to the world within minutes of his birth. Later, when they're looking for pictures to frame or save in an album, they'll be caught short if that low-resolution mobile-phone image is all they have. At the professional level, the more critical problem is digital storage. The fear is that as technology evolves, any storage medium in use today will eventually become obsolete and the material it holds lost to future generations.
We'd be hard pressed to find anyone stupid enough to use a cameraphone to take photographs of their child's birth (even a $5 disposable camera will take better pictures), so that part of the argument seems entirely disingenuous to us, but she does have a point when it comes to the problem of storage. Hard drives crash and CD-Rs aren't quite as hardy as we were led to believe, and there's no guarantee that twenty years from now you'll even be able to look at all those JPEGs on your PC (or whatever it is we're using to waste time during the day). Your memories are just one upgrade away from obsolescence, so print them out.
[Via SmartMobs]
