Images, motion and memory
 

Here's a very (kinda tired) random thought and I wonder what y'all think....

Ok, you see yourself in a photo and you're 2 yrs. old. You recognize it as you, or have just been told long enough that it *is* you. You may even have some real or constructed memory of the place or event included..You can kinda see yourself in that figure. (that's my experience).

I've been thinking about how amazing it is to see motion pictures. 1980s it became very very common to videotape your children. So these individuals, younger than I, have this mass, common experience. They have a distanced documentation of themselves as babies, maybe even being born, kids, moving, making noise and being alive. Do they have a completely different understanding of their past and identity? It seems a subtle but rather amazing experience. What do the elements of time, sound and movement add to this recognition and memory?

hmm... these ideas are a little too big for me. :)

There is a potential for increased empathy among these kids. Seeing herself wrinkled, purple, and wet from childbirth or naked covered in mud from head to heel, my older daughter can't help but identify with the feelings of younger children. Whether she is reconstructing the feelings from a video or simply constructing the feelings out of whole cloth, she's still better able to understand little ones.

We did make the decision early on though that we wouldn't let the camera rule the events. My oldest niece who has been under thumb of video always acts as if shes on stage because her Dad insists on rolling film constantly and intrusively. Mix this in with Brittany Speares and and the other fictions of mass media and you don't get a natural kid. Of course whats natural to us probably isn't even relevent to the rest of our society.

That's a great metaphor. I guess this really is about new media and changes in the cloth. I found this timeline thingy that ties into this somehow..
http://www.angelfire.com/wi/teriford...chronology.htm

A travel book I read once suggested that when you videotape a vacation, your memories are more likely to be of the video of the vacation; while if you photograph it, your memories will be of the vacation itself.

I don't know. Maybe that's just hooey.

Nothing kills meaningful dialogue like the presense of a recorder. My folks had a 8mm camera when I was a kid. The nice thing was there was no evesdropping of sound so people kept talking when the camera came out. I recall from the films (or was that a real memory?) that there was a great deal of hands over the face and people leaving rooms though. Our concept of what constitutes privacy probably changes along with the technology, how much of your day is captured at least temporarily? Add in the folks with web cam.... theres a lot of material here.

When we travel, ideally I take 5 minutes at the end of the day to journal it. Combine the still photos with the journal entry and you get a fair approximation of your feelings at that moment. Nice thread warch.

Journaling when traveling is so valuable- you get a truer take on what was really going on. I'm not a natural journaler, basically pretty lazy, but I am so glad to have some thoughts written down from some of my travels.
Some maybe dont notice the distance, experiencing adventures only through a video, after the fact. (The classic faceless voice, from behind the camera, narrating what's being recorded on holiday... out the bus window, down the street, here's our room...)

I suspect people are becoming less image shy, more quickly able to put on their performance face and maybe even need to be recorded for it to feel like it really happened, maybe there is no difference as in the webcam scenario. You live the performance- never an un-mediated event.