Memories

I still remember going over the pictures of my childhood over and over again while growing and then as an adult. I made sure to show them to my friends while in college. Then when I got married I have shown them to my wife. Then comes my daughter and I have shown them as well. In all there are at most 20 pictures of my childhood that are stored as memories. Obviously as it is only 20 pictures, people enthusiastically went over them every time I showed them.

Then there were two dozen pictures of us visiting Hampi and Warangal. As the camera reel is limited, my father made sure all the important aspects of architecture were covered and of course me and my sister got equal (or nearly equal) chance of getting into the picture. We stored them as sweet memories. Whenever I take a glance at the album, it brings me back the architecture of Vijayanagaram and Kakatiya empires in front of my eyes.

Now comes ubiquitous mobile cameras and other digital photography, combined with madness of social networking. We started capturing everything just for the heck of it. Sometimes in a rat race just to use the picture as an excuse to post in social network when we really have got nothing to say. Pictures which served as memories, stopped being so when we started capturing everything we do. 

We see a dozen pictures posted on social network of people eating out and the dishes they chose to eat. I cannot really understand why “eating” is a memory, for a person who eats 3 meals a day. I can understand if the person comes from country like Somalia where eating 3 meals a day a luxury.

We get hundreds of likes and comments from friends. I don’t want to sound sexist but the truth is fairer sex gets more likes. I see people uploading 100 pictures in one go and honestly I feel bored after looking at 4^th or 5^th pic. I seriously wonder if the persons who liked and commented on the album, have really taken all the time to see them or just responding as Social Network courtesy.

Then comes Selfies. Oh my God, I am not exaggerating if I say that there are people who take 100 selfies in a day. I wonder if selfies have taken away business from mirror manufacturers. While it is not a bad idea to record how I looked like at a specific point in time, I feel it is an overkill if we try to record how I looked like at every point in time. Result? May be Gigabytes and Petabytes of pictures produced every year and giving business to BigData technologies.

One other thing with selfies is people making faces while taking them. Twisted mouth, slanted face, funny expressions. My grandmother innocently asked if the person has a twisted mouth while looking at someone’s selfie.

But frankly, in this huge dump of pictures, if I really wanted to extract a specific memory how difficult it is going to be?  Technology made it easy to capture memories. However, with inappropriate usage of technology we are creating more junk and thus making it difficult to mine good memories from huge pile of data.