It seems that each family has a member in each generation that acts as a photographer, a historian, or an archivist and memory for that family.
Two generations ago, it was my grandfather with his multitude of SLR cameras, Super 8 video cameras, slide projectors, and his attempts to archive it and store it across different formats. Unfortunately, with his passing, I know that my Mom and Aunt only got a fraction of what he created, took, and saved in his house and basement.
One generation ago, it was Victoria‘s Tito Rogelio. Much like my grandfather, Tito Boy loves photography, videography, and multimedia technology. I suspect his decades of media may dwarf mine.
In this generation, I have been using point-and-shoots, SLR, and video cameras until the late 90’s, and then I was one of the first people I know to make the transition to digital photography. With the help of a friend and professional photographer for the Washington Post, I had some of the first-generation Canon, Olympus, Nikon, and Minolta digital cameras back from when they were low-resolution, slow, and bulky.
Over the years, I’ve continued to stay atop technology and port each prior camera-generation’s media to the current technology. I now have dual-layer Blu-Ray burners, 24Mp SLRs, 4K video cameras, and 8K 360′ VR cameras. My digital content dates back to 1990, I have over 4000 pictures each year, and I have three decades’ worth of pictures and video included on my 24TB network attached storage.
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Just as much of my grandfather’s multimedia memories were lost with his passing, and that I fear the Villa/Verdan family will lose much of their photography and videos with Tito Boy’s passing, I also suspect that Vicky will have little to remember us by when my health deteriorates or my own time comes.
While we do have very technical family & friends, not everyone has the time, diligence, or inclination to keep memories moving forward as old media (35mm film, slides, CDs, DVD, HDD storage) succumb to entropy and die.
And this is probably indicative of our entire social media and culture. People depend on Facebook and Twitter to stay around forever and show them memories from years ago… but I dare you to show me photo albums from America Online, CompuServe, MySpace, and all the blogs/galleries of yesteryear.
Facebook is NOT an enduring memory of you, your loved ones, your family, or your friends. It takes devoted people, family members, or actual historians and archivists to keep our memories alive across the decades.
I completely understand your thoughts on digital. When I worked at Berkeley Lab (LBNL, DOE Lab) I was in charge of the Library, Archives, Creative, Design and Photo Services, Video and Publishing. As such, I had to create tutorials to help the scientists understand that everything they did, created, studied, had to be memorialized in journals or published works. We had a crew that went out to each scientists’ lab and even home to capture all the journals and notes. I always had to explain, you know what you are thinking, but those who follow will not. We know where the Gutenberg Bibles are! We know where the Declaration of Independence is and the Magna Carta. We really don’t know if your gold DVD will actually last 100 years. We don’t know what O/S our digital archive will be able to port to in 100 years, let alone 500. I used to think about that a lot. I have books printed once a year of my work. It’s shocking, but with all our technology, nothing has been more dependable than print.