Maybe I’m an old-fashioned millennial, but in my eyes…there’s something to be said for obsolete technology. I’m talking home movies in the 80s and 90s. We captured endless hours on a camcorder and organized them on cassette tapes. If you’re like my family, you have home movies on many formats dating back several generations. I have vivid memories of my great-grandfather’s external battery pack camcorder that was borrowed by everyone in the family. I spent hours watching terrible a/v quality VHS tapes of weddings, Christmas parties, birthdays, sports games… You name it, we couldn’t resist filming HOURS of it to watch later.
Fast forward to today: in my late 20s, I don’t know which backup volume contains the mixed photos and short video clips from my vacation last summer. I relive memories in my “On This Day” feed on my Facebook every morning. I can capture so many incredibly high-quality images and videos that I’ve forgotten the value of making sure my memories MEAN something. Long gone are the days I can access memories on demand in a simple format — unless I’ve invested the time in editing them together or found a service that can passively remind me.
As a millennial newly becoming a parent I am often confronted with vast differences in childhood 20 years ago versus today. As the last generation that remembers the era of “home movies,” how can I preserve my memories for my kids to see in the future? Can I really expect them to scroll through the endless expanse of my cell phone’s media backups? Do I want them remembering the most important moments of their lives in 30 second video clips? Can I rely on my Facebook feed to wade through my memories for me?
I can’t help but feel I am slowly burying myself in a massive linear stream of my smartphone’s “backup” feature. Endlessly filling my storage folder, dumping it and capturing more seconds of my life at a time to repeat the cycle. This feeling makes me long for the time when digital memories felt special. It feels wrong to dispose of them as rapidly as they are captured. I may be old-fashioned, but maybe I’m cheating my kids out of those home movies I enjoyed so much when I was growing up. I feel challenged to dust off my camcorder and start passing it around at family gatherings. I promise in 20 years you won’t regret doing the same.
