Not even our memories!

Today is the 30th March and it's still trying to snow out there. The sun's been shining today, too, but it's still pretty cold outside. I did think about going out earlier, perhaps for a stroll along the river, but I haven't managed it as yet. Instead I'm sat on the sofa, huddled under a blanket with my cat, Scooby, watching movies.

Last night I was catching up with a new T.V. series, Revolution. It's only recently begun and it's about a world that exists in the present day without power. At the beginning, everything was quite normal, but in an instant and without warning, everything that required power to work just stopped working. Cars stopped right where they were, planes fell from the sky, lights and computers went off. Everything blacked out. A short while into the episode, and 15 years later, a female character was explaining to another why she continues to carry her mobile phone around with her, even though it hasn't worked since the power failed. Her reason? The mobile phone was the closest thing she had to photographs of her children. I made the assumption, at this point, that they must have died some time previous, and, even though she couldn't look at them anymore, the pictures she had taken, her memories, were still in there, stored on its hard drive.

This got me thinking about all of the photographs that I have taken over the years and have stored on my computer. I mean, I've got a box of old photos, probably not dissimilar to most people from the pre-digital generation at least, but, other than the pictures that I have on display in my home, all other documentation of fun times that we've had over the last few years are stored on my laptop's hard drive.

How times change. Only 10 years ago I remember having to take pictures on a camera with film that needed to be developed. You could get black and white or colour film in 24 or 36 exposures and they were sent away and developed, or, if you were in a rush and didn't mind paying even more money, done in a couple of hours by some retailers. And, until you got them back, mostly with 'over exposed' stickers all over them, you had no idea what you were going to get. Sometimes, you might find an old roll of film in the back of a drawer that you had forgotten about and had never got developed and you'd have no idea what it was of until you got it back from the photo lab. It was all part of the fun.

Nowadays it's so much simpler. Everyone has a mobile phone with a camera on it, or a digital camera with a display screen so that you can see the picture that you have taken instantaneously. It's truly ingenious. You can just keep snapping to your heart's content and it doesn't cost you a thing, only the memory space on your phone. And when you want to have hard copies, something to display on your mantelpiece, well, you just upload them to your laptop and print off the ones that you want on your printer and the others, they get stored in files on your hard drive. Easy peasy!

However, this does mean, of course, that we place all our trust on technology and our hard drives always being accessible in order for us to be able to access our memories. 

Lovely memories from the day my beautiful wife and I got married

Life has changed so much in the last few years, everything is electronic now, computerised or digital. Even our clocks are digital and change their own time in accordance with British Summer Time. There's no more need to put the clocks back or forth, unless you still have some of the old kind in your house of course, it can all get a bit confusing in our house. I haven't truly known what the time is since 1998!

It's funny how times change, isn't it? It does make you think though, eh. Perhaps we shouldn't take things quite so for granted. Not even our memories.