Data is temporary, memories are forever
As far back as 1999, people have proposed marriage through web comics, video games, and even online services like Twitter. While these stories are a geek’s dream, I can’t help but imagine that older generations and so-called “conservatives” would feel otherwise.
“After all,” as I once wrote, “shouldn’t there be a bended knee, with a risk of total humiliation for the sake of getting someone to live with and love you for the rest of your life? Here’s something else I’ve considered: if I proposed to a girl over Twitter, and a few years down the road, Twitter closes down, wouldn’t I lose a record of what’s obviously an important event in my life?”
But then I realized that the way we share — and record our memories — are dependent on the tools that we use. Our parents used film, had the negatives developed, and put the pictures in photo albums. We take snapshots with our gadgets, storing them on our PCs or uploading them online to share with others.
Even Twitter is just a digital representation of how we express ourselves to each other. My dad vocalized his desire to spend the rest of his life with my mom. The guy who proposed on Twitter did that through the Internet, while someone else popped the question by programming his own version of Bejeweled from scratch.
Yes, it’s possible that Twitter can go down within the next few years. And the Nintendo DS where the Bejeweled marriage proposal ran on will become obsolete. Anyone who’s lost a laptop or suffered a hard disk failure can tell you that any information on a computer — pictures, videos, and music aside from documents and applications — can disappear forever.
But even the traditional methods suffer from their own sort of fragility. Pictures can fade from exposure to sunlight. Albums can be lost in a (knock on wood) house fire. Granted, the proper precautions keep these repositories safe, but the same can be said for photos on our computers (i.e., this is another reason why you should maintain good backups).
No matter what we use to record our special moments, nothing will beat our human capacity commemorate things. “Our collective remembrance of what happens can be more durable than even the most advanced form of storage and medium. Better yet, it can be expressed through any sort of technology, since the tools we use evolve to suit our needs.”
The data we possess, whether it’s something we hold in our hands or bytes stored in our computer. Yet our memories last forever, even if nothing was available to record them. There are no pictures of my dad’s proposal to my mom.
