Digital Photography: Are our digitized lives compromising our quality of existence?

Confessions of a Camera Whore

Everyone who knows me is keenly aware that I don't go far without a camera. I'm usually the resident observer and family (and friend) historian, the sentimentalist who captures life's Kodak moments and posts them for all to see. In summary, I am a photographer. Whether doing freelance portraiture or capturing personal moments, I am often called upon to provide a visual account of my life's script (and yours).

I bought a hard drive and have been storing my digitized collection (which began in 2000 - I was one of the early folks to adopt a digital camera) as the CDs they are stored on are day-by-day becoming unusable and obsolete. (I have already had a few casualties.) Picture storage is something people rarely think about, but every year, you are loosing quality images on your storage devices, so you best think about upgrading and, if possible, finding webspace and clouds to store them in online.

The task of deciding which pictures to permanently store in a virtual space are daunting, because I'm realizing that there is an endless and exhaustive number of photographs I've taken and how do you decide a photograph's worth? 

Yesterday, I was struck by a profound revelation...

I miss old film cameras. This is the generation of "NOW", where people don't have patience because they aren't wired to wait. The price tag we've paid for this instantaneous fast food nation mentality, aside from said impatience, sense of entitlement, lack of self-control and impulse problems, and reduced attention span, is that we have lost a sense of mystery, wonderment, and anticipation. We can see what our picture looks like immediately, we can even edit it on our cameras, we can take as many photographs as we want (depending on disk space), we can save considerable amounts of money (by avoiding buying film, development prices, and not buying photo albums), and we also economize space on our shelves. However, those old-school limitations allowed us to put our own limitations on ourselves - since there was monetary value at stake, we controlled our usage of photography and only snapped what we deemed an important moment. Now, every moment is an incredible moment, and often - an incredible waste of our time and digital memory. If I were to count the photographs in the physical picture albums at home that were mine (pre-2000), they would count in the several hundreds or possibly a thousand. Looking at my full hard drive, the digital pictures I've taken in the past 11 years alone number in the hundred thousands. How on Earth am I supposed to dig through that many photographs, nonetheless sort them into "virtual albums", and make decisions about which ones I should keep? What, exactly, am I snapping so many photographs for? I have memory, I can rely upon it...

Imagine what I would have been able to do with all that time as far as productivity. Are we that important that we have to own so many photographs or update our status on social networking sites constantly? When is memory not enough to sustain us?