The changing face of memory

There are few photos of me growing up, 3 at most. I have a few more from my teens. Each time I see them reminds me not of when they were taken, this has long faded, but of when I last saw them. There is a rush of memory felt when someone has a photo of you that you have never seen before but once your photo virginity is broken it can never be reclaimed. The photos power is lost, well weakened. A process somewhat like what happens when we take a photocopy of a photocopy then photocopy that photocopy, continued. Or tape recording something, recording that recording including background noises, continue. The end product loses all semblance of the original. 

I have more photos of my dog than there are photos of my childhood. Chilfren growing up today are photographed and filmed bty parents, the CCTV footage stream of our lives follows us. These kids will have unparalelled histories of themselves. Living longer suplemented with vast digital histories these kids will not be like us.

I spoke to a 20 year old girl at a party a year or two ago and her voice came from some postmodern nightmare. There was a nostalgia for a world she had never seen. She spoke of days gone by whren youth culture was something in constant evolution. How could we have imagined punk before punk? it was new. Now, she said, they can choose from all the youth cults like revellers at the fancy dress party at the end of the universe yet these costumes could never hold a deeper authenticity that people of my generation were party to. Perhaps she was taking pity on an old mans confusion with the 'new' yet I think there was something in it. There is a sense in which pop culture history has become like a cultural snowdrift. Each film, each piece of music we hear is immediately compared to a vast back catalogue. It isn't only in getting old that all new things seem to be less original, it is also true. Memory is changing. We are less dependent on it. With You Tube we have already trawled our childhoods for all nostalgia. We can't get a retro buzz off 0s TV anymore. The digital age is bringing everytime in to immediate focus. The timeline is no longer so strong. Time itself is changing in to a pool from which we can select rather than the conventional traintrack where events had to happen in sequence to make sense. To a degree this deprives culture of depth. Punk came out of a specific window that will never be open again. No one now can see how opressive disco and prog rock had become. Rotten swearing on the telly has no power stripped of its context. 

This is huge change. I wish there were films of my childhood. I just wish that I hadn't seen them till now.