If you've ever watched a PBS documentary about nearly any subject from say fifty years ago or older they all tend to be very similar in how they relay the information to you. At least the Ken Burns style has a certain way of showing you what happened, or at least how people remember it. Usually there are old photographs and someone narrating to set the stage of the time and place. Maybe there will be letters read by various people from that time, along with more black and white photos. It's a fairly effective way to tell a story when all the people involved are likely not around anymore to tell it. The thing is though, how much of the story are we really getting? In some cases the event is just too large to try and tell all the stories so instead it has to be focused on just a few people who experienced; say a town, a unit of soldiers, or a specific group of people that were impacted by whatever it was that happened. We know right away that something like World War II seen through the eyes of a small town in Kansas will be a much more emotional story than trying to cover something that went on for years and involved a large portion of the world while it was happening. Any documentary is going to attempt to tell a certain story, even if that story changed from the time they started to the time they finished. The filmmaker is going to influence the information that they find and maybe there is no "true" version of any event that is in the past.
I'm sure everyone looks back at yesterday and wonders how they got by without what we have now. We quickly become accustomed to today's features and it's almost alien to think of a time when they didn't exist. Ask someone under the age of eighteen to think of what life was like without the internet or a phone that you carried in your pocket. Ask someone under the age of forty to imagine life without the civil rights we have today or of a time where mankind only dreamed of going into space. The previous generation is always looking at the current one and wondering if they really know what's going on or how good (or bad) things are in comparison to how they were. Once you go back farther and farther it becomes more difficult to get a true record of what was really happening then. People took pictures and recorded it on film. They wrote about it and kept track of their thoughts just like we do today, but the ease in which to store and spread what you saw and experienced wasn't always easy. Plus often times things were just lost because at the time no one considered it to be important enough to keep. How much of history is just memory because someone didn't feel the need to capture it? And maybe that's not exactly a bad thing. Somethings aren't meant to be captured. Some moments are here and gone before we know what to do with them.
Today we have even more means to record the moment, for all the good and bad that comes with it. Not that long ago people would break out the camera to capture special moments like holidays, graduations, and weddings. Sure there were some people who recorded more than that and probably have boxes of tapes sitting around somewhere collecting dust. Most of it may not be anything anyone wants to go back and look at. Maybe though someone will find those tapes and catch a glimpse into moments between the big events. Looking back at childhood pictures you may notice that in a lot of cases they were posed or were taken during a special occasion. Some of that had to do with the fact that the camera wasn't as prevalent as it is today thanks to smart phones. With everyone walking around with a camera in their pocket it means we have a lot more pictures of mundane things (and a lot of cat pictures). At least for me there is a lot of mystery to how my parents were as kids. I've seen pictures of them and I know it's them, but it's a moment frozen in time. I don't know of any movies of them. Any letters that they wrote were written for a specific reason, say a letter home or whatever.
Today we email, text, and tweet to the point that its specialness is lost. I'm not saying the form of communication is bad. It's just that when you can send an email at any moment during the day about any subject then it loses a bit of its importance. Tweets and texts aren't any different. Maybe you kept that text to a childhood friend, but I have a feeling that after about the fiftieth one you're not too concerned with saving it. Now a letter from that same friend may be something that you carry around with you for years. Is what they have to say any more or less important than in the text? I'm not sure. How about the pictures from your tenth birthday party where that one kid ate too much cake and threw up on your presents? What about the picture you took of the bacon wrapped shrimp you had last week? Maybe in that moment it was important, if only to you. Does quantity of recorded memories reduce the quality of them?
People today don't tend to write letters as often anymore and most of our
communication is electronic. Plus we tend to change phones, phone
numbers, and email addresses quite a bit throughout our lives and even
if we don't, we don't really keep a lot of that old communication laying
around. In say 30-40 years if someone were to try and piece together
the life of someone living today do you think it would be easier or
harder to do since we tend to be somewhat disposable with our
communications to people? You'd think that with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Myspace, email, text messages, random photos taken with your phone or camera that you'd get a fairly clear picture of a person's life, but are we right back to where we were fifty years ago where the pictures and words left to tell the story are only the highlights that we chose to keep? We have what seems like instant communication, however, are what we recording anything that worth keeping? Is the majority of what we capture ultimately going to end up in the electronic shoebox in the back of the closet? That's if it's saved at all. We assume that someone is keeping that information somewhere. It's like when you pass someone broken down on the side of a busy road. You don't stop to help because you figure there are lots of people. Someone has to be on it already. Not everyone could drive by without helping. On a lonely country road though you may be more likely to help someone because you know that you may be that person's only hope for a long time. So do we think it's safe to not worry about keeping our history of today because someone else in the sea of millions of capture points will do it for us? Twenty years from now we may look back at today and wonder what happened to our history because we don't have anything more than some 1s and 0s to hold the place of something tangible that reminds us of how things were.
