Elaine and I spent some time this weekend looking at pictures taken by a friend who served an LDS mission in Japan (where Elaine and I both served) back in the early 90s. As we carefully passed the photos around, I realized that my feeling about print media has changed subtlety over the years.
It had been a long time since I’d handled a photo that didn’t start life digitally. I realized as I tried not to harm this one-of-a-kind artifact that my intuition, for lack of a better word, is that print media are cheap, almost disposable approximations of digital media. My gut tells me now that a printed photo is just an ephemeral version of the real photo, which is digital.
When did the fleeting, ephemeral qualities I used to associate with digital media come to be attached to physical media? When I pause and think consciously about it, my head still tell me that print has infinite battery life, infinite resolution, and will survive the impending EMP desolation (not to mention the ever changing file format merry-go-round we all know and love hate). I found it a but disorienting to realize that my intuitive sense of the world had moved so far without my noticing.
It made me wonder if any of you have had a similar experience, or if you can even understand what I’m talking about…