Losing your memory

Are we losing our memories? This isn't about amnesia, dementia or Parkinson's, but the fact that we are losing the ability to remember our past in whatever way we wish. Many of us now own a digital camera or video camera that allows us to capture virtually every moment of our lives, leaving the imagination unemployed when it comes to recalling the day.

The total documentation of birthdays, weddings or summers has taken away our chance to embellish a story, improve an anecdote or slip a little white lie into our reminiscences. There is 100% photographic proof that the day went accordingly or we can pause, then rewind, the precise moment something went wrong instead of recounting the tale.

Over the past decades, we have always tried to capture the true moment on film, along with bad haircuts and the decade's fashion, but we were usually limited to 36 exposures or sixty minutes of wobbling camera footage. Now we can take over 2,000 photographs and create an animation with them if we wish.

I was born in 1978 and in the family album there are barely fifty photos of little Asa from that year. A few years later, my Dad purchased a Cinecamera, but it wasn't until 2000 that the reels were transferred to video and we could watch them teary-eyed one Christmas. My daughter was born in July and we have taken nearly 3,000 photographs - many, many, many bad ones - in just three months and sent digital video clips around the world hours after her birth.

Family 2,000 miles away can watch her grow up and we have a document of her first weeks, but how will looking at those photographs in twenty years match my memories? Will I feel as though I did not pay attention because they do not match or irritated if somebody corrects my nostalgic ramblings?

Part of me is thankful that we did not film her birth because I can edit the highlights in my head and create a showreel of the moments I want to remember, in the way that I want it to be. The event was shared by my wife, two midwives and I, the moment of my daughter's birth does not exist anywhere else except in four memories.

The past was never as good as we like to believe, but when we finally have some control over time, albeit the past, why shouldn't we reconstruct it to make us happy? Nostalgia is a great method of exercising the imagination, so why spoil it with the truth?