Preservation
2017 06 14
|
etc
no date
2024 +
2025
entries
home
A friend of mine is looking for a copy of yesterday's Toronto Star because there's a picture of her in it and her mom wants it as a keepsake. I'm of a generation, and so is she, that did this sort of thing as a matter of course - if something important was in the paper, something that we wanted to keep, we'd clip it out and put it in a scrapbook, fold it inside the front cover of a book, frame it and hang it on the wall. It was the only way we had of preserving certain kinds of memories.
This was, of course, prior to the Internet.
As I was looking at her request, it occurred to me that we are now facing generations of young people who might have absolutely no understanding of why we'd want to do this, since the Internet allows them to acquire and save anything and everything. For posterity, for the next five minutes, for the length of a Snapchat memory. The Internet might have an attention span of only a day, but its memory is as eternal as your hard drive's viability and your proximity to a delete key.
We are also facing generations of people who live a kind of ephemera that we of older generations might never quite understand, even though we live it too. We put a lot of stock in physical manifestations of things, finding them to be the only "real" version of a thing - a picture is only real if its in a frame on a wall, a book is only real if you can hold it in your hand. I still struggle with this idea a little, of seeing digital material as being "real". I think, in some cases, it has a lot to do with control - we can control what happens to things we can hold in our hands, but it's hard for us to trust in the reality of something that we, in essence, have no control over at all because it's not in front of us.
We also have a far different notion of privacy than the Ephemera Generation, because we grew up without being exposed to things that could allow us to share every thought every day, to put our lives on display for the world. You can't escape the long memory of the Internet though, so I think the oversharing might end one day, when folks realise just how much it can come back to bite you in the ass - or, they just might grow up not caring that it will.
2025 06 13: I just recently encountered someone discussing the differences between the various generations and how they act in public. Boomers will tap their feet, GenX will dance, but GenZ doesn't do much in some cases, and they theorised it's because GenZ knows it's being watched, and fears the scrutiny along with the public sharing of it.