A Photo is Worth A Thousand Pixels

I was at a beach this week enjoying my six hour vacation. I was planning on taking a longer vacation, but six hours into it I realized that current technology does not allow for anything more than snippets of a vacation surrounded by time spent reviewing emails, cell phone calls and text messages. I saw everyone else at the beach doing the same thing: answering their cell phones, or checking them to see why there wasn't a message and then calling people or texting them because we cannot stand to be out of touch for more than a hour or two at a time.

In some ways I see us returning to the 'small town' communications of generations past where everyone knew everyone else's business and you couldn't go anywhere that you weren't recognized or known. The small town is now a global town, but the theory is the same. We all want to know everybody's business and comment on it. The difference is that we no longer have significant personal relationships with many of these people. We can gossip and complain anonymously now. We can peer into peoples' lives via Twitter, without taking the time to be actually in a person's life. That allows for a lot of comment and judgment without context.

I also noticed something else on the beach. (Actually I noticed a lot of things, but some of them are better left to the local authorities to handle.) A group of girls was very busy posing in and out of the water. They were staging a bunch of photographs and were very excited about being at the beach to do so. The interesting part for me occurred when they had completing their picture taking. They gathered around the digital camera to review the results of their efforts, laughing, giggling and screaming as they looked at each photo in the camera. They then hugged each other, ran to their towels, gathered their stuff and went off in different directions. They said very little to each other after viewing the pictures other than agreeing on which ones would be posted on Facebook and mentioning that they would text each other later to decide where to meet for dinner.

I realized that I had just watched a very different social interaction than I, and my generation with me, would construct or understand. I spent much of my youthful summers at the beach throwing frisbees, body surfing and listening to current music with my buddies. Yes, we occasionally engaged in attempts to meet and greet members of the opposite sex, but as I recall it was only for the purpose of engaging in deep, spiritual discussions. It's my story and I'm sticking to it.

When we took pictures, it was for the purpose of remembering the activities and the moments we shared as friends. For these girls, the memorable event was not the activities at the beach, but the viewing of the pictures. The pictures did not memorialize an event - they were the event. The core of the personal relationship that exists between these girls is the connection via Facebook and the internet, not the actual time spent together at the beach or doing other activities. In fact, many of the activities are staged in order to develop more material and pictures for their digital relationship.

I look at a computer screen and see either work that needs to be done, or a method of gathering information to support my decisions and other activities outside of the digitial realm. Our children look at a computer or cell phone screen and see entertainment, relationships, communication and decision-making opportunities. In essence, many of their activities away from the digital realm support their time in it. The digital realm shapes their thinking rather than the other way around, much like our developing road system shifted our population into the suburbs and television shifted our cultural focus to Hollywood. It is something we must understand in developing curriculum that now must provide context for the digital realm rather than merely instruct children on how to obtain information via the internet.

By the way, I was going to post some photos from my vacation, but then you would know where I went and even more people would be able to find me.

Photos ("Gerard - Beach, Teenager" by sebastien.b; "Twitter website screenshot" by Spencer E Holtaway)