The endless photographs on our phones are a sad substitute for memories
There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure...but it is never safe to make an assumption about how the different generations feel about anything, from vegans to scented candles.
This week Christopher Howse and Guy Kelly share their takes on photographs.
Many families have been snapping away over Christmas. Being cooped up makes people irritable. But some of the snapping has been photographic, not vocal, and I’ve got an idea about photographs.
But first, may I mention Boots the Chemists? That’s what we used to call them. Now they call themselves a pharmacy. It seems pedantic: they don’t bring Bunsen burners and test tubes to work. But it’s like being a doctor. GPs don’t have to complete a doctorate before they practise, yet we call them doctors.
Anyway, Boots sells a ‘Photo Memory Box’. You keep photographic prints in it, with one at the front framed by the box itself to ‘fit perfectly into your home as a stylish decorative piece’.
In reality most people have hundreds of photos – food on plates, babies on rugs, husbands on holiday – taken carelessly and left carelessly on the phone. There they’ll stay until the phone is updated or the Cloud bursts or X exits. They’re never turned into prints.
With Boots’ box for prints ‘you can easily share them with loved ones’. That’s the last thing loved ones want. If you settle on the sofa and say, ‘Let’s share a few prints of my rogan josh from that rather disastrous evening in Newport, Monmouthshire, in 2013,’ any self-respecting loved one will shy away, suddenly remembering she really must sort the recycling before it gets dark.
If the loved one is absent, you might take a photo of your photo and email it from your phone. But that’s where we came in.
Worst of all is the notion of photos as memories. They are a memory substitute. Instead of remembering the Queen as she rode past in a carriage, you’re left with a partially obscured semi-state landau and a blob that might be the back of the Queen’s head.
We used to laugh at Japanese tourists with camcorders jammed to one eye, so that only through a viewfinder did they ever see what they’d travelled to enjoy. They’d never watch the videos they’d made either. Now we are all second-hand phone viewers with never a photo worth sticking in an album.
I sometimes think that if my mobile phone had a personality, it would be an imbecile. A heart-in-the-right-place, doing-its-best-to-learn, affable sort of imbecile, but an imbecile nonetheless. A Rodney from Only Fools and Horses. A Lenny from Of Mice and Men. A Grant Shapps.
I think this mainly due to the activity of the Photos app, which long ago replaced the irritating friend who forces you to look at holiday albums. ‘We made you a new memory!’ it tells me, first thing every morning. This is about the only app I allow to send me notifications, but I like outsourcing my memory – it feels like the kind of eerie thing AI is meant to be capable of in 2024.
Once in every hundred or so times it’s bearable: gosh, has it really been four years since that pigeon got trapped in the Tube carriage? Aw, wow, look at that, 342 times I sent or received images of perfectly poured pints of Guinness; now I want a beer for breakfast. Terrific.
But the other 99 times it’s just a collage of eight receipts I photographed while on a bus when the expenses deadline was approaching, displayed under the heading ‘A sunset road trip through Walworth’.
Or it’s a picture from this day two years ago of a near-empty milk bottle I passive-aggressively WhatsApped to make sure a replacement was bought on the way home. Or it’s an emotional montage composed from shots of WiFi passwords taken in various Airbnbs, with a house music track slowed down to a mournful crawl.
I was recently blessed with a photographic mélange of desserts – ‘Sweet treats :)’. There was that chocolate fondant from a pub in Devon. There was the pastel de nata from the wedding in Porto. And there was… a photo of a rosé-coloured toilet bowl, from when I had to send a doctor the colour of my urine every day for a fortnight. Golden memories indeed.
Like a cat owner offered a decapitated mouse, there’s no option but to accept the thought was there. But I suppose we should take some reassurance from it. Artificial intelligence isn’t always as intelligent as it promises. There’s life in us yet.
