One of the greatest inventions in the last 15 years has been the iPhone photos app.
It’s the one that brings me the most joy. The way that it suggests you revisit certain photos out of the blue from a year or two ago is extremely powerful. You’ll get a notification on your phone to revisit the birth of your granddaughter, or maybe your wedding day, or that great vacation you took, or even just a random trip to the coffee shop with your stuff.
And when you do give in to the notification and take the suggestion to see those photos, it awakens something in you. It brings you back to the moment in a very visceral way. I know this is software, this is high technology, and it doesn’t feel like it’s primal or ancestral. But, I actually think it is.
Consider how much data, content, information, news, and other options we have vying for our constant attention. Our lives are much busier and messier than they were 100 years ago, a thousand years ago, or 200,000 years ago. Nowadays, we are much less likely to randomly think about a fond memory from the past. We're much less likely to dwell on remembrances, pleasant or otherwise, spontaneously. While there’s no empirical data suggesting this, I think it’s pretty likely a lot more time in years gone by was spent mentally revisiting the past, lingering on memories, and fully inhabiting those memories. I imagine our mental landscape was far more vivid because it had to be—with much less assistance from media, books, movies, TV, and the Internet.
What I’m suggesting is that smartphone photo apps with their suggested memories are incredibly ancestral. They are far more similar to the way we remembered in the past than we remember today. Today we have so many things on our mind that sometimes we need a little help making a memory vivid and real.
So, while it’s easy to be cynical about the role software plays in our lives, to scoff at the outsourcing of our memories to smartphone photo apps, I’m all for them. I think getting reminders to revisit old memories and the photos that accompany them is actually more ancestral than never thinking of them at all. The important thing is to sit in the memory, to feel the feelings they produce in you. I’m not a sentimental guy, but when I see some of those old photos, my eyes get a little watery in a good way.
What do you think if the photos app? Let me know in the comment section of
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