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About a year ago, my husband and I had travelled to Barcelona on vacation. One of the things that we did there was to watch one of Spain’s biggest, most successful football clubs, FC Barcelona, in action at their colossal home stadium, Camp Nou. I was no football fan, but the entire experience was thrilling to say the least, and I went in determined to document this unforgettable day in the most comprehensive manner that I could. I took pictures of Messi warming up, a short video of Neymar waving to the crowd and a series of other photos through the game.
I was also simultaneously using a messaging app to share live tidbits with friends and family across the globe. If you’d read the sports news then, you’d have known that it was a great game. FC Barcelona won 2-0 over Real Sociedad, courtesy a fantastic header by Neymar and an unbelievable bicycle kick by Pedro.
I was there when it happened. And I don’t remember any of it.
Your cute pet dog, of whom you have a thousand photos, never forgets a scent. How many moments with friends do you actually remember? ~ Photo: G.P. Sampath Kumar
Your cute pet dog, of whom you have a thousand photos, never forgets a scent. How many moments with friends do you actually remember? ~ Photo: G.P. Sampath Kumar
Oh sure, I have videos, and photos, and even a couple of tweets, and I do remember what happened in the game, but if you want me to describe the proceedings, I can’t. I’ve been afflicted with the memory loss that accompanies my generation’s incessant need to take photos of every meal, every outfit, every other thing that the dog does. 2014 recorded 657 billion photos on the Internet, 1.8 billion images being uploaded every day (you know that annoying friend on your Facebook who won’t stop sharing photos? Apparently he has about a billion other people for company) and the number doesn’t look like it's going to come down anytime soon.
However, in what feels like a cruel twist of fate, this need to capture everything around us has started affecting our own memories.
A research experiment was carried out recently where 28 university students were taken to a museum. They were made to take photographs of fifteen objects, and to merely observe fifteen others. As it turned out, students remembered those objects they merely observed better than the ones they had taken pictures of. Dr Linda Henkel, the person who initiated the study, noticed something even more interesting.
If a student had, say, zoomed into the photo, their memory of the object was just as clear as it would have been if they’d taken the time to observe it.
The sheer volume and lack of organisation of digital photos for personal memories discourages many people from accessing and reminiscing about them. In order to remember, we have to access and interact with the photos, rather than just amass them.
The study concluded that if you aren’t going to pay attention to what you’re taking a photo of, you’re going to suffer from “photo-taking-impairment-effect” or the lack of the ability to recall details.
The ‘photo-taking-impairment-effect’ works on the same principle that calculators and mental mathematics do. I remember when I was in school — and more so during the last two years when I’d taken the commerce stream — I could do three-digit multiplication in my head without so much as blinking. Once I started college and my chartered accountancy, the electronic calculator entered my life on the pretext of making my problem-solving faster. It took me a mere couple of days to get accustomed to that evil contraption, the repercussions of which I suffer even today — it takes me a minute, a pen and a piece of paper to work out how much eight times twenty four is, after which I give up and use my calculator anyway to find the answer (it’s 192). It’s as if my head, which was once a sprinter, learned how to drive, and then became convinced that it could never walk.
The problem with the multitude of pictures that take up space in our phones today isn’t the photos themselves as much as it is our inability to sort and organise them. Fifteen years ago, before digital cameras found their way into our hands, photographs were a luxury limited to birthdays, graduations, weddings and other parties. A roll of film could hold thirty-six photos on average (Can you imagine a whole life event, sometimes multiple life events which could be chronicled in thirty-six photos? I mean these days, the perfect selfie takes about forty tries, and that’s the minimum).
Source: Wikipedia
Ichiki Shirō's 1857 daguerreotype of Shimazu Nariakira is the earliest surviving Japanese photograph. Daguerrotype involved polishing a sheet of silver-plated copper to a mirror finish; treating it with fumes that made its surface light-sensitive; exposing it in a camera for as long as necessary, which could be as little as a few seconds for brightly sunlit subjects or much longer with less intense lighting; making the resulting latent image on it visible by fuming it with mercury vapour; removing its sensitivity to light by liquid chemical treatment; rinsing and drying it; and finally sealing the easily marred result behind glass in a protective enclosure.
So go on, take that selfie now.
My mother had the habit of getting photos developed immediately once we had gone through a roll of film, and sorting them into albums, after which we’d sit together and reminisce. Even today, we sit and reminisce whenever we go to the shelf with the albums, but our archive has seen very stunted growth after 2005, when our photos and, consequently, memories went digital. The rate at which I take photos so happens to be inversely proportional to the rate at which I print them and, because of this, about half a decade’s worth of memories have been shoved into a USB drive that I’m too afraid of using because I’m sure that it’s been corrupted. Even the optimistic assumption that it’s all intact isn’t going to go very far in the way of invoking the kind of nostalgia that organised albums do.
“Research has suggested that the sheer volume and lack of organisation of digital photos for personal memories discourages many people from accessing and reminiscing about them," states Dr.Henkel. "In order to remember, we have to access and interact with the photos, rather than just amass them."
In the month of January, I was bestowed with the opportunity to participate in The Hindu Lit For Life festival. Since I was moderating a talk, I had access to the writers’ lounge, an exclusive space for the writers to sit down for a cup of coffee or tea before they went back to their next session, or to the hotel. It so happened that when I was in the lounge during the second day of the three-day festival, Alexander McCall Smith walked in after what was clearly a tiring session on stage followed by numerous book signings. I mustered up the courage to go speak to him while he had his tea, and told him about how I had read The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency when I was sixteen, and about how it remains one of my favourite novels to date.
McCall Smith was very gracious, and we even had a short conversation about his style of writing and humour. I was mesmerised by his very presence, but for a second, I felt what can only be described as an itch to reach out for my phone and ask him if he would take a picture with me. After all, it isn’t every day that you get to chat with one of your favourite writers. Then I took another second to imagine his photo juxtaposed with my various selfies, dog photos and pictures of food taken at tantalising angles, and decided not to take a photograph to mark the conversation.
Sure, I may not be able to have a tangible memory that I can pick up and reminisce over, but I’d rather have it recorded in my mind than in a microchip.
