The Instagrammatic Memory

I think it's a bad thing.

:|

When the present is gone, another present arrives. If you spend the present 'designing' how you're going to remember a moment which was supposed to be a present but was in fact a design for your new present to remember your old present, you spend the new present looking back at what you think was a present but is in fact a design....

You're not really living if you spend your time designing what you're going to remember, and living later moments remembering something you designed telling yourself this was your life.

You are simply stuck upon the idea of cherishing and loss. Your problem is the fact that the present quickly becomes the past, but this is why it is a present. So precious. But that makes you wanna cherish it so much you no longer know how to appreciate living it.

Your solution is to materialise the present, but the paradox is that the moment you spend materialising what is supposed to be the present moment is a moment gone already. You cannot live the moment twice. The living self and the remembering self are not two different selves. They are and have always been one, and both really live in a single moment.

You are then the only one missing out, because time cannot be frozen, reversed, nor is it infinite.

What is fascinating about human memory is that it works without materialising images. Your subjective map is made up of the moments you have actually lived. You show those fine clips in your montage as if they have all been spontaneous perfect captures with no effort or acting involved. We all become artists? Wake up as to what image-construction is. Your very choice of images should tell you that the instagram generation's capture, the real one not the one in the background of your video clip, is not the realisation of the perfect spontaneous capture that a human memory is capable of.

The one sad thing here is that you suppose documentation is the only, or main, form of human memory. "You are given a pen," like you can now remember what you previously couldn't. Unfortunately, you are suggesting that this digital tool is what creates the mental map which is subjective and makes us know who we are. While in fact, it is nothing but a redundancy of a function that is inherent to our human being, materialised for profit, and presented as indispensable.

There is a small seed of a similar thought in my blog about using a film camera as opposed to using a digital camera. Find it somewhere at the bottom of this entry:
http://photographeronbudget.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/third-film-olympus-xa2.html