This is why we have memories. But perhaps today’s youth are so drug-addled in the brain that they can no longer have them.
Back in 92, I completed a Standing Naval Forces Atlantic cruise. The only camera I had was a Canon sure shot.
Me and a few other guys were essentially tourists. See the sights and take tours. I kept as much film as I could and used it.
Anyway, some gave me grief about taking so many photos during the deployment. Near the end, more than a few wanted to buy snapshots since they were constantly drunk on every port visit.
I don’t exactly know how to say it but people now don’t LIVE in the way that people did fifty years ago. Children don’t have the same insatiable curiosity and I am hearing small rumblings indicating that some young people are already tired of the constant barrage of technology. I know I am tired of it, I find myself daydreaming of a place with no TV, no computers, no cellphones, in fact not even any electricity.
My wife and I can access more television “channels” than existed in the entire world when I first saw a television but there is very little that I find interesting any longer.
I actually began noticing a long time ago that some people were so obsessed with taking still pictures and videos of events that they missed the actual event. Everyone acting as if they had been hired to film a wedding or something. I practically stopped taking any kind of pictures long ago when I realized how many hundreds of slides and prints I had accumulated, some of them very good if I do say so myself, that were just occupying space in a closet with no one ever looking at them. People take so many pictures now that they defeat the whole purpose of taking pictures, if you have one good picture of something it might be worth looking at but if you have a thousand second rate pictures no one is interested. What is the point of a lot of pictures that people look at a week after the event and then never look at them again?
I can’t agree with you that it’s drugs wrecking their memories, but the continuous attack on the attention span that’s been going on, by my reckoning, with MTV.
For example, count — if you can — the “cuts” in a TV commercial. The 15-second commercials (because 30 seconds is too long these days) might have ten or more, and it’s the very rare 30-second commercial that has less than twenty.
Some commercials, UFC pay-per-view fights come to mind, are literally uncountable without rewatching via the DVR at half speed. I’ve counted over 50 “cuts” in some 30-second commercials. That’s not even something you are supposed to watch; that’s something that’s just supposed to make you think, “wow, something cool is happening here, I think.”