I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little tired of all the “conveniences” of the modern world that seem to mostly cause chaos. I don’t mean indoor plumbing or air conditioning or cars, none of the things that are actually conveniences. I don’t even mean computers. I’m actually a big fan. What I’m thinking of are the more recent technological advancements that have become such a large part of life that they seem as essential as any of those things.
I’m not old enough to remember the advent of cellphones, but I do remember a time before everyone had an iPhone. There’s a lot I like about smart phones, so don’t think I’m suggesting we abolish them. So much these days is structured around the assumption that everyone has a touch screen device, whether we like them or not. Since there’s nothing wrong with the devices in and of themselves, I don’t have a problem going along with that. It may seem bold and alluring at first, but one or two or even a few hundred people ditching technology wouldn’t accomplish much more than the luddites accomplished a couple centuries ago by smashing machines.
What I’m ready to ditch is allowing devices to take over our lives. I like the way my phone lets me get in touch with people easily, snap a photo when I’m out and about, or do a quick google search if I’m not at my computer. Those may not be true essentials, but they are legitimate conveniences. They also don’t have a net negative effect on anyone’s psyche, at least not in a big way.
Social media, on the other hand, has not made my life significantly more positive or convenient for quite some time. I deleted all social apps (with the exception of Pinterest) from my phone around Thanksgiving of last year. Social media did nothing but cause me to “waste” time in a way that left me feeling overstimulated and stressed. I often have my phone with me because I’m waiting on a text or email or to keep track of the time or serve as an alarm. When my phone is in my pocket, it’s all too easy to pull it out and start scrolling at the first sign of boredom. Then a few minutes turn into 45, and I’m left feeling, well, yucky. Overwhelmed by real and fake, true and untrue, all of it harder to sort out with each passing day. (By the way, I’ll still be using social media to share book and blog updates, I’m just limiting what devices I use it on and how long I spend.)
Ok. You’re probably thinking: what prompted this and what does it have to do with a camera?
My mom and I have been working on some scrapbooking. We’ve been flipping through photos of my childhood and jotting down the memories they spark. Most of those photos were taken on a little silver Sony Cyber-shot. That little camera is responsible for recording 95% of my childhood. And it still works! I got it out and charged it up yesterday (or, rather, the day before I initially wrote this.) I’m excited to start documenting my life again.
Looking through old photos always makes us feel connected to the past in some way. For all of us, no matter what generation we’re from, the past always seems like a simpler time. I may never have walked ten miles to school in the snow, but I do remember carrying around that silver camera instead of an iPhone 13. I took pictures for myself and my family, not Instagram. Somehow, those old digital photos have something iPhone pics don’t. I think some of that is nostalgia, the rose-colored glasses that make one generation think records are the best, one reminisce about cassettes, one cling to CD players, and will probably give the next one fuzzy feelings about MP3s. Maybe someone could inform me that, objectively, an iPhone camera is better than my 20-year-old point-and-shoot. Ok, I’ll keep that in mind if I ever become a photojournalist.
But, for documenting the good moments of life, I’ll take the old reliable. My little silver camera has more character than my phone. I like the old digital sound of the buttons. I like the noise the shutter makes and the buzz of the zoom lens. I like how I have to take out the memory card and transfer the pictures to my computer before I can share them.
In short, I like the process. With every passing day, it seems that we become more “advanced,” which has gone from meaning “convenient” to meaning “instantaneous.” From film to digital added convenience. You no longer had to drive your pictures to a developer and pay to get them developed, but you still had to wait until you could plug the memory stick into a computer before you could do anything with the photos. The first phone cameras weren’t much of an improvement. The quality was low, and you still couldn’t do much with the pics directly from the phone. With the dawn of smartphones, however, taking, editing, and sharing photos with the world is the work of a few minutes. And, now that we’ve reached the futuristic year of 2025, we spend more time looking at the world through our phone cameras than through our eyes.
That instantaneousness and perpetualness has led to the oversharing and overstimulation I’m tired of facing on social media. For a lot of reasons, I’m learning that life is a process right now. Yes, my excitement about my old camera may be mostly due to the grounding nostalgia it provides, but it’s also a way to reclaim the process. I welcome the opportunity to move slower and think about what I want to document in each moment, not what I want to share in the next.