Try and keep our eye on the big picture (picture keeps getting bigger)

As you've probably heard, the Polaroid is now extinct. Having been relegated to retro-status for a few years already, making them prone to showing up in indie movies and music videos, Polaroid pictures are now, I'm sure, merely the first casualty in a long, losing battle as film gets overtaken by digital photography. It's only a matter of time before teenagers listening to "Hey Ya" fail to catch the reference.

In general, the Digital Age has changed a lot about how people live, think, and relate to each other, but when it comes to media, I tend to think that some of the practical impacts have been relatively minor. Did switching from VHS to DVD really change our lives that much, besides getting rid of Blockbusters' cheeky reminders to "Be Kind, Rewind"? Mp3s made music more accessible, but Lord knows we still have aging recluses cultivating and hording their iTunes like Rob Gordon and his real-life counterparts did their records.

But cameras and picture-taking are different. Digitizing photographs has entirely changed the way we "do" memory-making. Remember when you had to buy film? When you were limited to 24 or 32 pictures? When you had to wait 3-5 days for film to get developed? When, during the waiting period, you crossed your fingers, hoping that when you shell out $15 to get your pictures back, you wouldn't disappointingly discover that the looming tip of your pinky eclipses the right side of 3/4 of them?

Due in a large part to these things, in film-based photography, pictures are for you. In the days, weeks, or even months that pass between picture-taking and picture-developing (have you ever found a random, 3-year-old roll of film?), by the time you get your prints, anyone else featured in your photographs have likely forgotten about you and your camera. You're concerned only with the moments that you want to capture, the people whom you want to remember, the most important parts of your experiences. If anyone else sees your developed prints, it's probably because you cornered and guilted them into pretending to care about your trip to Nebraska, not because they particularly wanted to.

As old people are chronically complaining, thanks to digitizing, things are much, much faster now. No more waiting, no more developing, no more limits to the number of frames. While there are dozens of important benefits and conveniences in this advancement (e.g., sharing memories with long-distance family members; quick 'n easy blackmailing), there is the perhaps bitter-sweet byproduct that the focus is, at the core, no longer on you.

For example, if one of the points of taking pictures is to have a memento/proof of yourself being in a certain time and place, logically, you want to be in those pictures, thus giving you the image/alibi you desire. It's not terribly narcissistic to ask people to take a picture of you with your camera, because, well, why else do you have a camera with you?

At least, that's the mentality with film. The combination of digital photography and Facebook has led to an unspoken obligation between picture-takers and their subjects, that the former must share and tag and include the latter in their memory-making. Over 90% of American college students have a Facebook account. (That, by the way, is higher than the literacy rate in many countries.) Don't we feel weirdly pressured to take pictures of people whom we wouldn't in the days of film? But we know that they know that we have a camera, and won't we feel a little jerky if we don't include them in our album? Also, we probably shouldn't take too many pictures of ourselves. We don't want to look self-centered. There are other people around who need to be tagged.

I guess, in a way, Polaroids foreshadowed the digital trend. It was the first camera to bring us relatively instant gratification, after all. So while I'm a little sad to see Polaroids go, I can never stay terribly mad at a demise that carries such delicious irony.