ON TECHNOLOGY AND GRANDCHILDREN...AND FEELINGS. AND OTHER POSSIBLY IMPORTANT THINGS

Recently I've found myself dwelling on the future, which, although not an unusual pastime for me, has turned into a vastly different train of thought. (I also have to say that I've been dwelling on my disgraceful lack of writing on this blog, and how LAME I feel because of that. Anyways.)

I've been thinking about how all of the technology that has infused itself into our society is going to effect our posterity. I mean, think about it! With the videos and photographs and blogs and social media outlets that we inhabit with every insignificant detail of our lives, our children and grandchildren are going to be able to see us and understand us in our young ages in a way that we never were able to with our grandparents...and even our parents. My grandchildren will be able to see multiple, if not thousands of pictures of me as a young adult and, should Facebook ever be made archival, how I interacted with my friends. And then there's me, with all I know about my grandparents at my age contained within a few old faded photographs and handwritten letters or journals that leave me wishing that I had a better idea of what they were like way back when.

And I thought about how incredible it will be for my progeny to have so much access and insight into who I am RIGHT NOW when I'm old and wrinkly and retelling the same stories over and over again while they pretend to love me and don't bother to hide the rolling of their eyes because I can no longer see anything...yeah...I promise I'm not bitter about growing up...

But anyways, the point is that I was viewing this in a completely positive light...until today. A couple whom I am somewhat acquainted with recently got engaged, and a video of the guy proposing was uploaded to Facebook. A video. It was taken by someone hiding in a bush or some other form of shrubbery who was obviously set up by the guy getting down on one knee. It was really far away, it was blurry, and you couldn't hear a single thing except for the heavy breathing and stifled fits of happy laughter from the person behind the camera. I've been aware that the whole "sneaky picture of the girl's reaction to the proposal" has become a fad recently, but now...a video? Really?

The existence of this video got me dwelling on the irony of our excess usage of technology. Yes, we have a lot of technology, but does that mean that we have to use it? We're pressured to think that we need to record everything in our lives now with these tools, but I can't help but ask, can't some things be private? Can't some events and aspects of our lives be personal and not out in the public domain for everyone to see? I believe there's something incredibly romantic about the idea that when I'm proposed to someday, it'll be just between me and the man I'm planning to spend the rest of my life with- a moment that only the two of us will experience, and no one else will ever see. I think that things like this should be intimate and personal and kept between those who are actually involved instead of projected to the world of social media for all of the nosy, snooping people (who believe that they're entitled to know everything about your life because you have a Facebook account) to witness.

And is it really important that we capture that moment on video? Do your children really need to see a blurry video with no sound in order to believe that you were actually proposed to? I mean, I've never seen videos of my parents and grandparents from back then and I'm still comfortable believing that they got married! Are we really going to sit around with our kids someday and say, "This was a selfie that I took before a football game one time. Oh, and this was a selfie that I took the next day driving to work. Ah, those were the days, kids. And you can tell how cool I was by how much of my lip is protruding from my duck face." 

Yes, our posterity is going to have a lot more access to our lives now because of technology, but...how much does it really matter? 

Although I honestly do think it's cool that we'll have more stuff to show our children, there's something to be said about the magic of storytelling and imagining. I know that someday I'd rather sit my daughters down and tell them the story of how I was proposed to, complete with vivid descriptions and details of what I remember from that moment and how I was feeling than show them fifty almost-identical shots of my reaction and a low-quality video taken by a hired roommate creeping in a bush. I'd rather have them create a glorious image in their respective minds of what it was like, even if it's completely off, because then that memory will be their own. Something beautiful is lost in absolutes. Recording absolutely everything leaves little to the imagination, and the imagination is so important.

I mean, that's the reason why there aren't pictures in novels, right? An author provides us with rich descriptions and details, and from mere words on a page we construct appearances and landscapes that are so real that we get all hot and bothered when a movie based on the book comes out and it doesn't look exactly how we pictured it. Because we LIVED it. Authors know that allowing us to create an image in our heads makes it so much more real to us than saying "there once was a young boy named Harry Potter and here are thirty actual pictures of him at different angles so you know exactly what he looked like and as you can see his scar is exactly one-and-a-half inches long and at a 45 degree angle right above his right eye, which is actually a lot less green than you'd imagine it to be."

Yeah. That would have tanked.

So I guess what this all boils down to is the fact that I'm scared about what all of this technology is doing to us and what it will do to our children's children who at some point will, like me, want to know more about their grandparents. Some of the prospects really do seem amazing, and I'm excited for them to know so much more about me than I did about mine, but...I hope that our obsession with preserving moments and images doesn't interfere with truly experiencing life ourselves. It can be fun, and it's definitely revolutionary, but how much of our drive to document is for nostalgia's sake and how much of it comes from our desire to go home and post it on Facebook to see how much attention it gets? 

It's worth thinking about.

When I get engaged someday (in the far, far distant future...which is, like, very far away), I want to know that my husband cares more about me and the very personal and special moment in which he asks me to be his forever than making sure he gets my reaction on camera so that all of his Facebook friends can experience it later...right along with me. It will be a moment meant for two people that won't be witnessed by hundreds of others, and it will be perfect for that very reason.

I just think that we could all do for a little bit of privacy in this overwhelmingly public world.

...I sincerely hope I'm not the only one.