February 19, 2002
You oughta be in pictures ...
When I was a kid, you were lucky to have a handful of black and white photos taken of you as a baby. Your relatives could tell if it was actually you in the family christening outfit, by looking at the clothes that they themselves were wearing. To me, it looked like one generic baby.
By comparison, today's kids are media darlings. Hundreds -- if not thousands -- of photos have been taken, and the back of each one is stamped with a date. And this doesn't even begin to consider all the videos, from baby's first step through high school graduation.
While all of this takes up a lot of physical space, we take comfort from just knowing the images are there, carefully stashed in all those boxes.
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Now I, for one, have never been bitten by the digital camera bug, at least when it came to family photos. The results just plain aren't good enough. Neither the resolution nor the color quality really satisfy. So when I could check the box at the film developers and get both film quality and my photos digitized to CD, I was one happy camper.
On the downside, I needed even more space to store all this stuff.
Recently, I read about a new digital camera technology developed by Foveon. It's so good, it's reported to be better than 35-millimeter film. While only the core technology has been announced, and the actual cameras are still some ways off, it seems like a breakthrough is about to happen.
Then I read one simple sentence uttered by Dr. Carver Mead, the famed Silicon Valley pioneer and founder of Foveon. He said, "There is no longer any need to use film."
And that's when I reacted.
How much information have I lost over the years using computers? I've accidentally deleted files, my storage media has gone bad, and my software has gone awry. I'm going to trust my family's heritage to a computer?
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Leonard Shlain, the author of "Art and Physics," once told me, "There was hardly anyone by the end of the 19th century who had not sat for their photograph." In fact, he related, "Let's say that you asked someone if their house was on fire, and they could run in and only retrieve one personal item, what would it be? In the previous 300 years, everyone said, 'The family bible.' After the 19th century, the answer changed. It became the family photo album."
In the 21st century, it's not one family photo album - there are closets full of them.
Pondering all this, I came to one conclusion: to really do the job, the guardian mindset of one generation needs to focus on the technology of the next. I can't imagine burdening my children with all this - sorting and copying, not to mention the physical storage space.
If I really am a guardian, I can't ignore the latest technology. I need it to preserve my children's heritage.
But I still wonder about this: Let's say we query people today, and ask them, "Your house is on fire, and you can run in and only retrieve one personal item. What will it be?"
How many of us would say, "My computer."
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
