Today it is a common mistake in the "higher-speedier-wider-faster" form of the so called "blog journalism" to put only the latest news of the last 10 hours through the mincer and see what happens. No one really takes the time and the trouble to go into details and puts those articles together which are related to each other.
Here we got three articles. Two of them are from October 2003; this, in internet times, is a unbelievable long time ago. The articles are about the reality and/or the fear of losing memories, images, files, or vice versa.
Joanna Wane: Slipping into the past used to be a magical journey through the cobwebs and mothballs in grandma's basement...boxes of old photographs and family albums that reached back in time to another world...Even if the pictures of long-lost relatives and distant childhood were faded or torn, beautiful new prints could be taken from negatives often decades old...For the millennium generation... they'll revisit the past by flicking through digital images on computer - if any survive. Concern is being raised that our pictorial history is at risk. Few of the images taken on digital cameras are ever printed out, which means many are permanently lost when the file is deleted or damaged. At the professional level, the more critical problem is digital storage. The fear is that as technology evolves, any storage medium in use today will eventually become obsolete and the material it holds lost to future generations...few are thinking much beyond immediate use. On a personal crusade to alert consumers, Jim McGee, a US photographer and publisher of online Vivid Light Photography Magazine recently highlighted the plight of a reader who lost four years' worth of images when his hard drive crashed and a new computer wouldn't read his back-up CDs. [Joanna Wane: Snap unhappy - digital photography's dirty little secret]
[Lorna Edwards]: Historical records as well as family albums may suffer, with less than 20 per cent of pictures making it into print, says the Photographic Imaging Council of Australia (PICA).
But instead of printing pictures when memory cards fill up, most digital camera owners store them on hard drives, which are at risk of being lost in computer crashes or virus attacks, or may not be printable in years to come due to technological changes.
Those photographs that are printed at home are often not on photographic-quality paper and are therefore destined to fade..."The tragedy is we may well look back on this period as a time when very few photographs were printed." [Lorna Edwards: Digital era 'a threat to memories']
[Daisuke/Ito, Japan Media Review]: Unlike the traditional camera, the camera phone is an intimate and ubiquitous presence that invites a new kind of personal awareness, a persistent alertness to the visually newsworthy that makes amateur photojournalists out of its users.
The camera phone is a player in not only published news but also personal news and sharing that never make it into a blog or moblog, much less the mainstream mass media.
In comparison to the traditional camera, which gets trotted out for special excursions and events -- noteworthy moments bracketed off from the mundane -- camera phones capture the more fleeting and unexpected moments of surprise, beauty and adoration in the everyday.
What counts as newsworthy, noteworthy and photo-worthy spans a broad spectrum from personally noteworthy moments that are never shared to intimately newsworthy moments to be shared with a spouse or lover.
The transformation of journalism through camera phones is as much about these everyday exchanges as it is about the latest headline. [Daisuke/Ito: Camera phones changing the definition of picture-worthy]
This was Part I: The Intentionality is gone: The Tidal Shift away from Photographing Memories
