For the past two summers, I have had the opportunity to intern with the archival departments of two community museums in west Michigan; small yet dedicated institutions focused on the preservation and exhibition of their local histories. Since my responsibilities as an intern over these two internships were mainly digitizing artifacts and cataloging incoming archival donations, I spent a lot of time with the personal belongings and ephemera of members of the museums’ communities, some of whom lived and passed decades or even centuries ago. During my internship, I engaged with artifacts that ranged from photographs, letters and scrapbooks to homemade prom dresses, travel brochures and magazine collections.
The boxes or shelves of artifacts that I was tasked with sorting through were accompanied by some description of who the owner had been, a name, birthday, occupation, and a list of life facts to guide me through the process of digitizing, researching or sorting the artifacts. But I found that I often learned a lot about the owner just by examining what kinds of things they had held onto. In many ways, people are like museums. Throughout our lives, we collect and preserve items that we find valuable or important, things that might be “junk” to others, but that have deep significance to us. Wedding dresses, photo albums, tickets from our first concerts, diaries, report cards, childhood drawings, and all sorts of mementos and keepsakes.
The storage room in the basement of my parents’ house is filled with plastic tubs of things like these. My dad’s old Star Wars action figures, my mom’s wedding veil, my sister’s and my childhood teddy bears, an old dollhouse, VHS tapes of home movies, and a shelf full of photo albums and scrapbooks. Just like a museum curator or archivist, we have our very own “archive,” full of artifacts from our lives that we believe should be preserved or even displayed. No doubt, you also have a similar collection of objects that comes to mind. In many ways, these collections serve as a historical record of our lives and our memories, just as the artifacts that I engaged with during my internships were part of the personal and collective history of the community.
Holding your childhood teddy bear and feeling the familiar texture of its fur against your hands or pressing a button on an old electric toy and hearing the noises it makes, brings you back to the memories of playing with them as a child. Sometimes, looking at favorite pages in an old picture book or smelling a crayon can bring back sensory memories that are hard to even put into words. Physical objects that we can engage with through all of our senses are important to memory-keeping and reminiscence.
But with the development of technology, our methods of recording and preserving our memories have changed. While there are still a few people clinging to the camcorders and digital cameras of yore, the majority of people across all generations use their phones to take videos and pictures. Instead of writing letters to friends and loved ones, we just send a text. Everything that we may once have collected to remind us of memories: concert tickets, newspaper clippings, announcements about births and deaths, receipts of important purchases, has all been relegated to the digital realm in the form of QR codes and social media posts.
On one hand, this is just the natural transition that takes place as technology advances and changes over time. As things change, humans develop different traditions, devices and practices for memory-keeping. With the invention of a hand-held camera that could be transported easily on vacations and into homes, gone were the days of the serious, polished, and occasion-based tintypes that had to be taken in a studio for a sizable fee.
The transition from physical forms of memory-keeping to digital ones is just another step in the development of technology, and yet, it’s important to consider what we lose when we move from a physical form of memory-keeping to a digital one. What happens when we no longer have family photo albums or scrapbooks, or bundles of letters from loved ones? What happens when a child’s favorite toys are digital games on their iPad and not a physical toy that can be held onto and preserved? What happens when we can no longer hold our memories or see them physically in front of us?
The digital realm can be an exciting and beneficial place full of knowledge, experiences, and interactions that help us broaden our horizons, and I wouldn’t argue that digital spaces and the internet are fully bad, yet fully replacing physical forms of memory-keeping with digital methods creates memories that are intangible, temporary and only simulations of real events and objects. You can’t physically hold your camera roll like you can a photo album. You can’t feel the textures of a phone game or a YouTube video like you can a physical toy or DVD, or keep birthday Instagram story posts in a shoebox like you can a card or letter. When our memories become digital, files that can be erased instantaneously and can’t be experienced with all of our senses, we lose their tangibility. Our memories lose their shape, smell, texture and weight, and instead, all we have is pixels on a screen. Granted, objects can get old or lost or fall apart or can be destroyed by flooding or fire, but they are real and material.
Some of my favorite artifacts to engage with in my archival internships were scrapbooks and letters, two art forms that, although engaged in by some, have fallen out of mainstream practice. As someone who plans to enter the museum field after graduation, I can’t help but wonder how my generation and the generations after mine will be archived. If we stop keeping physical memories, we are not only robbing ourselves of tangible memories but are also changing the way that we are remembered.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of 星空无限传媒. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, 星空无限传媒 or the Seventh-day Adventist church.