Bruces …
Your flickr stream is a curious thing. A strange mix of intimacy and detachment … like looking at curated photos of Google Street View. I wonder how often you go back and visit your old photographs to trigger old memories.
Our parents took photos to remember the past.
Today, we take photos to be part of the present.
We rely on the web as a kind of extended sense making, and a moment that hasn’t been digitized and shared in one form or another is in danger of never happening.
A few years ago, my online identity felt tightly bound up in my archives. Today, not so much. As the web has made the shift from pages to streams, from objects to flows, our digital identities have become unhinged from our records of the past. Our archives are being buried under a flood of Nowness and our sense of self is once again beginning to flow from our interconnectedness and social bonds.
On the surface there may seem to be a kind of pointlessness to electronically sharing the micromoments of our lives. But it’s fascinating that we’re beginning to rely on the neurons of strangers on the other side of the globe to make sense of even the most trivial, every day experiences like eating a meal, or people watching on a busy street.
