Daily Mail, 20.4.15
When I was two years old my older sister and I were dressed in our best clothes and taken to a photographer’s studio to have our pictures taken. My father was on leave from the Royal Navy at the time and wanted a reminder of his children to carry with him when he went back to his duties in the Second World War. In those days a good photograph of those you loved was something to invest in and treasure.
So, with one image enlarged and framed and put on the sideboard in our living room, and other smaller photos safely stored in his wallet, my father returned to the war.
How different our lives now are, when the millions of us who own a smartphone are able to snap away as often as we want at those we love and anything else that momentarily warrants our attention. By next year it is estimated that a quarter of the world’s population will be able to do the same.
It is all part of the digital revolution in computer technology that has transformed our world over the past thirty years. And in so many, many ways digital is brilliant.
From banking, booking our holidays, paying on the bus, shopping at the supermarket, designing and building cars, ships, aeroplanes, homes, skyscrapers…almost everything you can think of, right down to sending emails (and writing this article), digital technology has enriched and eased our lives.
Surely only a modern day Luddite – and perhaps the occasional now not quite so dishy older TV presenter, who hates that our spanking flat digital screen hi-def television sets cruelly show every little line – would disagree.
Or, maybe not. Because it seems to me that the march of progress doesn’t always keep everything in step. While many things are gained by any great leap forward, other things are lost.
When the CD with its digital sounds was introduced in 1985, music fans were in raptures. Albums would never again get scratched, and CDs were so much better to play in the car than those cassettes on which the tape was liable to stretch or snap. What’s more CDs were easier to store than those large pancakes of vinyl we used to love.
But thirty years on, as World Record Day showed last Saturday, those pancakes are making a comeback, with two million expected to be sold in the UK this year. Apparently, while CDs may be handier, the good old LP offers a wider, warmer sound quality than the compressed noise we get on digital.
I suspect, however, there’s something else, too. Getting an LP wasn’t just about the music it played. It was about saving up and going to the record shop on the day it was released. Then there was the time spent admiring the artwork on the 12” cover, before writing your name on the back in case you took it to a party and someone made off with it.
It was about ownership of something that was precious and big enough to hold in two hands, something to keep and value for life and remind you of what it was like to be seventeen. A five inch CD could never compete.
And while online sources like Spotify may be handy for instant access to your favourite music, what they offer is no better than a personal juke box really. The records being played aren’t, and never feel like yours. The natural human factor can get lost on digital.
It’s the same with the books we love. When Kindle and other electronic readers came along, prophets of doom were quick to announce the death of the traditional book.
But it hasn’t happened. Nor do I think it will. Digital books may have bitten an early slice out of paper book publishing – about a third, seems to be the general feeling, but their growth is levelling off now, as the industry gets its act together and fights back with ever more dazzling covers. A visit to a good bookshop now is like a visit to Aladdin’s grotto, so imaginatively are books presented.
That isn’t to criticise digital books. I publish several of my own on Kindle, mainly those that are out of print in paper. And when I need a book for some quick research for something I’m writing, I can have a digital version on my screen within five minutes. For me online readers are good for work. While for those of us who spend a lot of time travelling, the convenience of having dozens of books on the one small reader is huge.
But when I want a book for the sheer pleasure of reading, or as a gift for someone, it’s the traditional book I go out and buy. Somehow the feel and smell of a book, the physical act of turning the pages, of leafing backwards and forward so easily, of occasionally making notes in the margin, just isn’t part of the reading experience one gets on a digital device. Which is why the walls of our house, and millions of other homes, are lined with books.
Books help furnish a home and a life. Read and reread, they become friends of the family. Many of our children’s books are still there, decades after those for whom they were bought moved out and got on with their lives. There they sit, waiting to be pulled down and enjoyed once more by a generation of grandchildren.
Yes, I know, the grandchildren can see the same books on their iPads, but what will happen when their iPads are dropped and broken, or are replaced by newer, upgraded versions? Will the books that were on the old model be replaced?
I doubt it. In every child’s mad haste to grow up, they’ll be forgotten. And with them a part of childhood will be gone, too – never to be discovered with delight years later, when found lying at the bottom of an old suitcase.
That will be sad. But, unless we all change our ways, there’s something else that won’t, in decades to come, be lying at the bottom of that suitcase, too: something that is more important than either books or records. Our family photograph albums.
Until relatively recently, images were usually carefully considered through the viewfinder of a camera before the shutter was pressed – because film was expensive. Now that we don’t need film we’re all shutter happy.
Most of the millions of photos taken every second around the world will probably be holiday snaps, shots of pals, celebrations, and, I suppose, some selfies. Some will be looked at once and either discarded or forgotten; others may be sent online to friends and relatives, looked at once or twice and then also forgotten.
Probably only a tiny percentage will be saved on some other digital device called a photo file. And although most of us have printers with our computers, my bet is that very few of our snaps will ever be printed.
I know this because I have thousands of printed photographs taken with a film camera before digital was invented, many of the best of which have been saved in albums. But very few photos have been printed and saved since I bought a digital camera ten years ago; and no new albums have been bought.
I kid myself that I know where all the digital shots are: that I’ll print the best ones off some day when I get time. But what if I wait too long?
What will happen to all my precious recorded moments if the photo file is accidentally wiped, or if my computer, and its external back-up, can’t be repaired; or if the next but three generation of digital technology can’t ‘read’ the version that holds my photos?
Ten years of my life, and my family’s life, will be gone forever. There will be no record of the holidays, no way of seeing how the grandchildren have grown, no record of the magic moments that all families share. Digitally created and preserved, at the wrong careless click of a mouse, or a power breakdown, they can be digitally lost, too.
Back in 1944 my father could never have begun to imagine such an invention or such an eventuality. But, when he embarked on what would be his last voyage in the Royal Navy he cautiously encased his wallet, containing the photographs of my sister and myself, in what he hoped was a waterproof wrapping.
It wasn’t quite waterproof. But when his body was washed up on the coast of Brittany after his vessel sank, and his wallet eventually sent to my mother, she found that the photos still in it were only slightly sea-stained.
How ironic will it be if one day, although I have the photograph of myself, aged two, that my father had on him when his ship went down in the English Channel over seventy years ago, I don’t have any of the hundreds of photographs I’ve taken of my wife, children and grandchildren these past ten years…
Because they’ve all been lost on digital.
