My mom came to visit last month and I took her around all over. What's notable isn't that we went so many places, but that she took so many pictures with her iPhone. The age-old desire to capture experience in a way that supplements (or enhances) memory isn't new. Maybe it was the iPhone, or the conspicuous snap-snap photo sound, but I couldn't help but be reminded of the way experience is consumed nowadays, as if it were a commodity, or at least too often designed as such.
And it's a good thing, a great thing, that my mom can utilize technology to capture her experience in a simple and share-able way. She is not the most adept at (or inclined to) encapsulating her experience for others, so having a hassle-free interface helps and maybe says what she otherwise wouldn't. After all, she's shared many a photo with me and my sisters over WhatsApp, allowing us glimpses into her life so we can keep in touch, as they say.
But I can't help but feel that her photos aren't simply to share. That is, the photos themselves, besides representing whatever was photographed, are also meant to say "here, I did something", or "see, I have things", or even "I have things too". And that that is perhaps the primary motivation for taking the photographs in the first place.
They say that technology keeps us from each other, that screens are the ever-present barriers between us and what we experience (and what we could experience). That it exacerbates our loneliness despite of (or due to) all the social networks we find ourselves embedded in, requisite images saying what we can't or wouldn't. And while I'm not one to deride technology (because we still have choice! I think), it's no coincidence that my mom evolved her own virtual presence in our collective absence. That is, alone. That she hadn't had the need to do so when we were still around.
Technology didn't cause her to be lonely, but by allowing it to fill (or cover over) an emotional void, it's distanced her from her own loneliness, from her self. Which is ultimately a salve, and yet not. Which is what technology is, or what it does. And we're not better of with or without it, we'd just better together, photos notwithstanding.