Memories and Horses

For this post, I am going to take a break from talking about running and focus on something completely different...

I teach at the School of Information Studies (SOIS) program at the University Wisconsin - Milwaukee. I teach classes pertaining to archives and records and information management.

In some of the weekly conversations with my students, we discuss issues related to memory, history, and cultural identity.

Let me put it another way. The few of you who read this blog most likely have digital cameras. What happens with all those photos that you take during your vacation, of your kids, or while you are out on the town with friends? Do you put them on Facebook, on another site like Picasa or Flickr, and/or do you download them to your computer? Regardless of what you do, what would happen if your computer crashes and you have no backup? Although highly unlikely, what would happen if Facebook or Flickr were to shut their doors tomorrow? What are the consequences of losing those pictures?

Yes, we would be devastated. It sucks. We might shed a few tears, but what are we losing? A good friend of mine once wrote that documents, such as photographs and emails, are touchstones, or triggers to memory. We look at the photograph or email and we recall the events that were transpiring at the moment that scene was captured. So, by losing those photographs, we potentially lose some of our connections to the past. With digital information, we can create a million different touchstones seemingly in an instance, but in the blink of an eye, these triggers may be lost forever.

However, I now wonder if we are too busy creating triggers that we believe will help us remember and, in a sense, this will be detrimental to our memory.

Look at the following picture. What do you see?

I'm sure we have all encountered this at concerts or sporting events, where the majority of people seem to be staring at their phones, trying to record the action, rather than watching the action. I would also guess that several of us have all been guilty of doing this as well. I sure am.

An astute reader of the magazine made a very interesting comment about this cover, saying "In looking at your cover, I couldn't help but wonder how many of the people pictured are going to someday wish they had a memory of actually seeing American Pharaoh cross the finish line instead of looking at their cellphones."

Several years ago, when I was living in Vancouver, a good friend of mine visited me for a week. Of course, he brought his digital camera. Unfortunately, during his visit, his camera "died." Panic set in and, obviously, he was upset, thinking that he had lost all the pictures he had taken to that point, not to mention hundreds of other images that he had yet to back up from the memory card. As we climbed over some rocks on Pender Island, I remarked that while the pictures would be nice, they can never do justice to how you remember the event or place. (On a happy note, my friend was able to recover all the pictures from the camera.)

Not Pender Island. Apparently, I did not take any scenic photos from that trip. This image is from the ferry coming back to Vancouver, BC from the Sunshine Coast.

Despite our ability to seemingly record every second of our lives, even if we did so, would we vividly and accurately remember these experiences? In short, I want to spend more time enjoying the scenery with my own two eyes, nose, and ears and less time worrying if the scene is in focus on my camera. The experience will be much more memorable.