ThinkFlood Blog

According to a University of California Berkeley study, we snap about 75 billion pictures each year — and that’s only traditional film photography. Although we have become accustomed to hearing about figures in this range (hundreds of billions spent on the Iraq war, 6.5 billion people on the earth, the combined wealth of Bill Gates and friend Warren Buffett or the Walton family), 75 billion is a huge number. To put it in perspective, counting from 1 to 75 billion would take almost 800 years of non-stop effort (assuming a sustained counting rate of 3 numbers per second).

The real question is why — why do we bother to take this many pictures? Is our intention to frame them and show them off in our homes and workplaces? Do we take pictures to send to family and friends? Or do we use pictures to remind us of events, people, and places?

Of course all of these answers are correct to a greater or lesser degree, but I think there is a more fundamental reason: pictures are an insurance policy against forgetfulness. I began to consider this idea a bit in my last blog posting, and it has been gnawing at me ever since. In my experience, the vast majority of the pictures that we take do not go into frames or even albums – most remain with the envelope in which we received them from the print shop, or tucked into shoeboxes under a bed — at best, we insert them into photo albums that collect dust on a shelf. Rarely do we take out these pictures to review them — whether or not we have the intention of doing so.

In other words, pictures fill our desire to cling to our memories, to prevent ourselves from forgetting a time and place in our experience. In this way, pictures are self-promoting. When we see an old photograph, we are so shocked about how muddled the details have become in our minds that we yearn for a means to hold on and improve what we remember. But right there in front of us is the answer — a picture that retains every detail with complete integrity, which stimulates our recall just enough that we can see things close to how they really were. In a world where we are bombarded with so much information that we cannot possibly recall it all efficiently, pictures serve as on-demand mind probes that give us a degree of control over our memories.

As nice as this insurance policy against forgetfulness may be, the potential exists for our pictures to be something greater. The fundamental problem we have been dealing with for the past century or so is convenience. Pictures collect dust on shelves and in shoeboxes because it simply is not convenient to sort through them regularly, to rotate them through the frames on our walls and desks every few weeks, or to find time to choose the best ones to reprint and send to family and friends. Sure, if we had the time, we would enjoy going back through all those old memories — sharpening our recall a bit and correcting our perspective on history. But who has time to do it all?

The fact is, few of us have or will take the time to sit down and flip through a photo album on a regular basis. Rather, we have a handful of our favorite or most cherished pictures that we frame and display so that we can catch a quick glimpse and jog our memories briefly as we go about other tasks.

Now let’s imagine a world in which at least some of those frames that draw our glance from time to time actually have rolling content — that more or less each time we look, we see a different memory. Of course this is not science fiction — today’s digital picture frames can pull off this trick, and they are becoming more affordable by the week.

But why should we limit our use of pictures to our recall? One of the powerful things about pictures is that they can be a vehicle for sharing memories and experiences with others as much as reliving them ourselves. Our society reveres photographs that speak to our collective conscious through media such as National Geographic Magazine — enough that we almost seem to understand, for example, what it is to look at the earth from space, though almost none of us have ever had (or may ever have) that experience.

Of course if bringing out pictures for our own review is cumbersome, then sharing them with others is at least doubly so, with the result being that we do it all too infrequently. And there we rob each other of the opportunity to expand our understanding and experience. Once again, however, technology can make this process easier, enabling us to zap pictures across the world almost in less time than it takes for us to think of doing so.

Unfortunately, it seems that the right mix of technology to make these activities truly convenient may not be out there yet. For all of their promise, digital picture frames still seem limited in many ways (picture size and quality, software functionality, convenient access to new media, styling), especially when we consider the benefit we receive for the cost. And photo sharing sites have yet to sufficiently mediate the inconvenience of uploading pictures — or managing who sees what and when. But we have to expect that eventually someone will get these things right, and then we will be able to realize the latent potential that exists in our pictures today — the ability to enhance our memories and grow our understanding and appreciation of the world and each other. These goals seem worth the effort of taking another 75 billion pictures or so next year.