2003-08-04 - 1:22 p.m.

Digital Age

It has always bothered me that I was driving around a 30-year old car, when 18-year old girls were given brand new $30,000 sports cars. When I finally got a job and money (and when my Cougar broke down), I just went and bought my own $30,000.

I've never liked Princesses. OK, Leia doesn't count. She can grub around in a trash dump with the best of them. What I don't like are people (men and women) who have come to expect that everything in life should be handed down to them.

Later when in graduate school I was shocked while visiting Norway (mid-1990s) to see 14-year old kids running around talking on their cell phones. Today people still look at me funny when I explain to them that I don't own a cell and have no desire to. I admit that they are useful, but I've watched way too many people become slaves to the devices. They are changing our society, and I think there is a cost and benefit. The benefit is we can respond to emergencies quicker. The cost is people are become less organized because of the little devices. I also think people aren't using their memories as much to store phone numbers and things. Hopefully they are storing equally trivial knowledge there instead.

Anyway, since I come from a family of pack rats and since I like to reuse / recycle things, it was only a matter of time before some other aspect of the digital age caught up with me. Saturday I bought my first digital camera. I'm super excited, and spent the weekend playing around with my camera.

Obviously the camera is going to help me in many ways, but what cost will also be associated with the camera? (Though an obvious benefit, taking nude pictures of your girlfriend or yourself isn't going to be nearly so awkward. I hated having to take my film into a non-drug store photography shop and say, "Um, the nude pictures are for a school project." It was a blatant lie both times, but fortunately I look young enough to pass for a college student and I got our photos back.)

That tangent brings up another disturbing thought. One day when I die and my family is going through my possessions, what will they think of the photos my ex took of me in the buff? And what will they think of the photos I later took of her running around naked in my folk's house? I don't know what, and while it puts a twisted smile on my face, I also realize that my family has always been fairly conservative about some things. Keeping nudes is a perfectly normal thing for many people to do (gee, mine are buried along with the rest of my photos), but I'm guessing it is a line my family would not cross.

n.p. monolith :: labyrinth

-=-

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