Within Reach Yet Out of Touch

I am the fourth of four children.

Most baby pictures of me include some or all of my siblings.  My baby book contains my name, birth date, length and weight and little else.

This in no way represents a lack of love or attention from my parents.  It does offer a peak at one of life's simple facts i.e. as the number of kids goes up, the attention to some detail goes down. My mom, in her words, always “hated detail” which translated into precious few notations into baby books and even precious fewer photos of just me.

So, of course, I grew up craving detail, and instructions, and rules.  It’s sad, I know. I hear the universe giggle every darn day.

My youngest daughter's baby book

My oldest daughter's baby book

I think one of the most outward expressions of my need to embrace detail (oh, let’s face it, correct the past) is the collection of photo albums and baby books I have maintained for both of my daughters.  Like any new parent, I photographed each girl as much as possible. Like any fourth of four children, I made sure my younger daughter had many, many photos taken of just her.  Oh yes, no child of mine was going to search for solo pictures of herself that did not exist or wonder when her first tooth fell out.

I was going to get this detail right.  And I did, pretty much.  Then, I let the digital age take the wheel.

Some family photo albums.

My daughters grew up when film photography was all there was.  Delayed gratification ruled the day.  There was no immediate photo preview on the camera. Ordering double prints was the fancy deal of the day.  And I ordered them – like crazy.  I needed prints for each girl’s photo album and one for our family photo album.  I like to think of this as merely covering all the bases but it has the ominous scent of OCD. 

And those photo Christmas cards taken every year? A copy of each is in both girls’ baby books so they have a continuous record.  Birthday invitations? Have ‘em along with a detailed description of the day.  First tooth? First doctor visit? Height and weight for each annual physical? Check. Check. Check. 

Oh dear.

This is why Carina Chocano’s NY Times Magazine piece titled “The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg” grabbed me.  Ms. Chocano posits that as the tactile things of memories (photos, letters, music, keepsakes) are relegated to devices as data, we are distilling them into thin air and losing something real. “For everything that’s gained by our ability to store and maintain more information than ever before, something is lost that has to do with texture, context and association,” she writes.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/what-happens-when-data-disappears.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=carina%20chocano&st=cse

Digital Photos

Her experience with data loss, (photos of her 3 year-old disappearing when her phone died) and a friend’s total data loss when her hard drive and back-up hard drive storage both died, sparked the author’s thoughts about what turns humans into cyborgs. She notes, “Our devices allow us to compress time and space in a way that we’re able to mentally transport ourselves between planes of existence with the touch of a button. (Or, rather, a digital rendering of a button).”   I realized I have succumbed to the vapor.

Most of the photos I’ve taken in the last five or six years rest in cyberspace on my external hard drive or stored in ‘albums’ on my phone or Shutterfly.com  I’ve lost touch with the touch of them.

My first and only attempt at scrapbooking was in 2009 when my oldest graduated high school.  I pillaged her computer for some photos since she naturally took over the job of photographing events in her life when she bought a camera.  I marveled at the life she was building.  I mean, I knew she was moving beyond life at home, but this abstract awareness solidified as dozens of photos I’d never seen whisked by me. 

Photo frames are digitized so a photo collection stored on a teeny memory card scrolls along presenting an eternal slideshow.  As I recently stood in line at a local funeral home to pay respects to a friend who's mother had died, I marveled at the large screen slideshow displaying photos of her life.  But I was physically drawn to the poster collages and various letters created by family members.  The items were lovingly placed along where visitors waited in line. I caught myself gently gliding my finger across parts of them, not in a touchscreen swipe, but as though I was touching her. The closer I could get to the memory of this woman, the better. Feeling a creased black and white picture from her childhood sure helped.

AT&T’s 1979 award winning slogan urging us to “Reach Out and Touch Someone” resonates.  Who could have predicted how we would apply that suggestion today? Ms. Chocano observes that her futuristic 3-year-old is “given to swiping a finger across things like TV sets and laptop screens and declaring them broken when they fail to respond to her touch.”

 I understand what we are gaining by increased digitization but I don’t understand if we see what is being sacrificed.  Or, maybe we press on embracing the iCloud or other external and ethereal "places" because to do anything less is to get left behind in the march to, well, where exactly?

Browsing book stores or record stores, something I definitely took for granted, now elicits a cherished nostalgia.  The release of vinyl albums and the efforts of small book store owners to stay afloat point to a quixotic human need to touch.  Author Ann Patchett (Bel Canto and State of Wonder) recently visited The Colbert Report TV show to promote not her book but a book store she recently opened in Nashville. The store name, Parnassus Books, is an homage to Mount Parnassus believed to be the Greek mythological home of learning, literature and music. http://www.parnassusbooks.net/  Ms. Patchett is putting her money where her books are, quite literally.

Times author Chocano addresses this reach back, noting “It strikes me that the current fetishization of analog technology has less to do with nostalgia than it does with an urge to slow down the transfer of data from the internal to the external, from the individual to the collective and to make it all less instant, less ephemeral, less interchangeable, and more tangible more linear and more contextual.”  I recall when our new elementary school was built about ten years ago.  My youngest was in kindergarten and the classroom in which she learned to tell time had a lone digital clock.  This rattled me.  Was analog dead? Well, the watch display case at Macy’s jewelry department tells me otherwise, but it sure isn’t on the rise.

At one of my high school reunions, a woman named Patty who was integral in its planning did something so spontaneous that it sticks with me today.  As she rushed out the door to the event, she had a flash that many alums would be talking and asking about each other's children.  She glanced at her kids' photos nearest the door, grabbed them and sped out.  When I picked up my reunion name tag, I noticed an array of 5 x7 and 8 x 10 framed photographs of kids displayed alongside. I first thought they were of alums as youngsters until I asked Patty. I howled at her snappy reasoning.  Patty brought me into her world with one swipe of her arm.  Today, I think the we would be swapping phones containing photos. Effective? Yes. Heartfelt? Not as much as seeing those framed photos. I was knocked out by her fun reflex and quick thinking!

Of course we can't be lugging around framed photographs all the time, but we can become more engaged by their physicality.

An over reliance on digitization feels like I'm asking my eyes to do the work of my hands. I am human after all – with an array of senses all of which must be fully engaged.  I want to remember because I know how to. I want to reach out and touch.  Ms. Chocano's thoughtful conclusion resonates, “Maybe our desire to digitize and archive every little thing is not a proof of a fear of forgetting.  It’s a manifestation of our urge to remember how to remember.”