Overexposed

Surveying the crowd at a concert last Friday night, I was startled to discover that what I thought at first were lighters-held-aloft (80’s-style!) were actually thousands of cell phone screens, all lit up and actively at work videotaping, selfie-ing, and otherwise recording the experience in “real time.”

This is the world we live in.  You aren’t really somewhere until you’ve posted that you’re there on Facebook or Instagram—or at least saved a few quick snaps to your iCloud. And let’s be honest…I did it too. I tried to take a selfie with my pals to mark the exciting occasion of being out on a Friday night and sharing in the spectacle of live music. Our selfie was a bust (it was too dark and we just came out looking like humps of flesh with teeth and eyes), but we got caught up in trying to capture the moment rather than just enjoying it.

These days we record everything—and then there’s the posting. We’re constantly whipping out our phones (with super enhanced photographic capabilities and huge amounts of internal memory) to catch every little thing. Here’s the half-glass of wine I have left in my glass! Here’s the gum I just stepped in on the bottom of my shoe! Here’s some random guy’s mullet that I just had to sneak a photo of while he was gnawing on an ear of corn! Snap, snap, snap!

Back in the old days (like the 90’s) photos and videos used to be about preserving memories, about capturing the very most important and special family moments for posterity, for future generations. Back when photography was first invented, you were lucky to be captured once or maybe twice in your entire life in a photograph. Let’s just hope it was a good hair day.

Which leads me to my current dilemma. I’m way behind in my family photo albums. Photos are piling up everywhere—on my phone, my real camera (yes, I still have one! It’s digital! I’m not using real film or anything), in my email inbox and all over my computer—iPhoto, Shutterfly, SmugMug. The digital footprint of my family is everywhere out there…piling up, unorganized, chronologically incorrect, unfiltered and unedited. This does not even take into account what’s happening beyond my control on Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat and Twitter.

I’m overwhelmed. Every time a kind friend, family member, acquaintance, or teacher passes along an amazing shot of one of my kids doing something (of course) amazing—I break out into a cold sweat. That’s one more photo that I’m not cataloging, organizing, filing properly. Somehow, in the course of quickly catching a photo of my boys on their way to the first day of school, I need to get ahead of this mounting mountain of memories. I am a hyper-organized person, with files set up inside the files in my email inbox. I make binders with dividers and plastic sleeves. I keep lists and I actually draw little check-boxes. But this? These photos? How’s a person supposed to keep up?

And don’t even get me started about the videos. When the children were little, we enthusiastically recorded every “Happy Birthday song,” every soccer goal, every learning-to-master-something moment. Of course, video technology was continuously changing, so I’ve got big tapes, little mini tapes, DVD’s, and some random cartridges, all containing our young family at its best. At some point, I abandoned videotaping completely. I wish I did have video of a few things, like maybe my dad pretending to trip with a birthday cake in his hands, or that time my high school dance team won the National Championship. On the other hand, I’m thrilled that there’s no haunting evidence of that trip I took to Cabo with a bunch of beach volleyball players, or of that time I decided to sing Desperado with the band in a dive bar on the Santa Monica pier. That’s a good miss. For everyone. (And really, I’m still sorry for those of you who had to hear it live.)

But I do care about the photos, the good ones, the shots that captured the moments we want to crawl back into. I used to make elaborate photo albums and baby books, diligently cutting and annotating while my babies were napping and the house was quiet. But then, I started running out of time. The soccer team would send a link with 832 photos from the fall season. Who has time to search through them all for the three of my own child? So, I got behind and then I got panicked into immobility.

I’ve decided that I need to catch up. I’m considering scratching those three years that I missed and just picking back up from today. I’ll create little folders on my desktop with smart labels like “Sports 2016” or “Halloween” or “Mother’s Day”. That way, when the photos arrive, I can just file them in the right spot and at the end of the year, upload everything, all set, into a nice album and press “Order.” That would work, right? I’ll still have to weed through the toothy selfies from the concert the other night, but hey, that’s a moment worth remembering too.