The Editor: A generation lost in the files
I don’t pay for Wi-Fi on planes. Every flight takes off with a plan to read a book. I set my phone to airplane mode. Nothing can come in or out. About 20 minutes in, I check my phone anyway.
I swipe for apps that work offline and settle for my camera roll. This is good. I can go through old photos, clear up space, and relive some memories. I end up asking serious questions.
Why do I have six photos of the same Ferris Wheel? When did I take a picture of my right foot? Should I really be storing this photo of my passport on my phone? There are valuable pictures, too, but they are scattered among blurry duplicates and screen-shotted memes. Eventually, I give up.
Even reading takes less effort than sifting through this mess.
Signal to Noise
Humanity started snapping pics about 200 years ago. Within a generation, we were recording sound and motion. Then mass communication struck the 20th century like lightning.
Today, we are inundated with photos, sounds, and videos, assailed by screens from all sides. Television ads, movies, trailers before movies, ads before trailers, trailers for the ads…
It gets noisy.
With social media, we participate in the noise. We carry high quality cameras and audio recorders in our pockets, gathering material to horde or broadcast at will. The simple fact that we can take pictures often compels us to do just that; if we don’t, we may miss something.
With ever-increasing storage space and infinite pixels to work with, we can capture without discrimination. The records of our lives are bigger than ever, but are they any good?
The Image Instinct
Recording technology is new in the scope of history, but even cavemen had family pictures. People have a primal instinct to preserve ourselves and our history. We can’t live forever, so we find ways to capture our world.
We tell stories around the fire, carve each other into rocks, fill scrolls with genealogies, and pull our cell phones out at concerts.
Our lives are our stories, and our stories are built from memories. Photos, videos, and sounds do the remembering for us, adding a new dimension to storytelling and preservation.
Disposable History
A picture used to be worth a thousand words. Photo inflation has diluted that worth.
Compare the camera roll on your phone to a family photo album. Photo albums are curated. Each picture is chosen and placed. The camera roll contains 11 bathroom selfies we don’t even want to show anyone. There’s that noise again.
When people come in to do a Legacy Interview, we record with intention.
That doesn’t mean we know exactly what is going to happen (it is actually better when we don’t), but we do have a goal: preserve a person’s life on video. We block out time and space to tell stories, drawing them out with questions crafted to maximize that time. Editing a Legacy Interview involves taking the raw footage and sound and crafting a beautiful presentation.
Clients supply the photos, we create the album.
Do the Intentional Thing
Our family stories are too valuable to be stashed in our proverbial camera rolls. They should be captured with intention.
Of course, a Legacy Interview would be a perfect step in the right direction, but even if you embark on capturing your family stories on your own, the process is invaluable.
That is why Vance is writing the Conversation Field Guide.
Our experiences at Legacy Interviews have yielded powerful insights into how to have better conversations and curate the right environment for storytelling. Whether you visit our studio or not, we want you and your family to share in the value of great conversations.
Living on purpose takes practice, but it is a practice we can all achieve.
