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Tech Has Drained the Reality Out of Our Real Lives
Old tech like disposable cameras inadvertently reinforced the vitality of real life, but modern cameras now create a superior virtual world we don’t feel good enough for
They always seemed like enchanted objects to me. The disposable cameras we stuffed into our cheap handbags in the late 1990s and early 2000s were really just empty plastic containers with a lens on one side. And yet, within that sealed box, there occurred a kind of alchemy, all the more miraculous for being mechanical, that gave us the power to freeze time. We could slice slivers off the shifting visible world, like doctors performing biopsies of living things, and keep the specimens to be pored over whenever we liked.
Through cassette tapes and VCRs, our dominion was extended beyond mere shavings of time to whole chunks of it. My sisters and I would record TV programs and films so that we could re-watch them at our leisure. I would crouch over the “play-record” button on my boom box as Tony Fenton — then the star DJ of radio station 2FM where I lived in Ireland — played the latest hits, poised to lay siege to my favorite songs like a huntsman hiding in a bush.
The devices may have been remarkable, but the results we got out of them were decidedly less so. There was a chunk missing from the middle of our bootlegged VCR of True Lies because my sister had forgotten to press the record button again after one of the ad breaks. And despite several attempts made over a few fraught weeks in 1997, I never managed to get the full six-plus minutes of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android. Tony Fenton had a maddening habit not just of chopping the song at both ends, but of bellowing over the parts of it that he did play in tones that were suspiciously American-sounding for a man from the outskirts of Dublin.
Evidence of our amateurishness was everywhere. But it was nowhere more apparent than in the pictures we took with our cheap cameras. And this had deep significance for how we saw ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
The first flush of my photographic enthusiasm was directed at the faces of my friends as we made our breathless tours of the clammy, smoke-wreathed…
