Pictures or it Didn’t Happen, Unless Maybe (And Hear Me Out Here) It Did

Photo of an old wooden wagon wheel leaning against a tree and covered with snow. — Are you tired of me posting pictures of snow? Well, tough. This is apparently my life now. It’s just snow, snow and more snow.

We enjoyed watching the Olympics these past couple of weeks, but while we were watching the women’s ski half pipe competition over the weekend something jarring happened. One of the skiers lost her phone. It flew out of her pocket while she was defying gravity and flipping through the air. The incident was exciting enough to get shown on the replay. The commentators noted it wasn’t the first phone they’d seen go flying at the games. Meanwhile watching at home, we couldn’t help but wonder what on earth was going on.

Are we the only ones that think it’s strange that in a sport where athletes are attempting to do aerial maneuvers and get as much height as possible they would voluntarily weigh themselves down with unnecessary electronic devices? I mean, if for reasons I don’t entirely understand you need to bring your phone with you to the competition couldn’t you have your coach hold it for you? Moreover why aren’t the coaches insisting that the skiers ditch their phones before heading down the half pipe?

I can recall high school track meets where any athlete who insisted on wearing a chain or earrings during the competition were required by officials to tape their jewelry down with athletic tape because there was always the risk that a stud earring could go flying and possibly injure another athlete. How is it that way more precautions were taken in that very low stakes competition space over a very unlikely scenario while there seems to be no rule at all about loose electronically enabled bricks that seem to regularly go airborne during the Olympics?

Then we watched the closing ceremonies. As the Olympians paraded into the stadium every other one seemed to have their phone held aloft filming as they walked. Enough so that the commentators made a reference to needing to capture the moment for posterity, the irony that we were sitting and watching this at home because a professional recording had captured the moment for posterity was not lost on us.

Look, I know this is very hey-you-kids-get-off-my-lawn of me, but I can’t help but feel that the younger generations are missing out on so much with their phone obsession. There’s more than one way to capture a moment for posterity. Actually being present in the moment, experiencing it and forming your own memories is a way to capture the moment for posterity. One day those athletes (God-willing) will be old and gray. Their progeny would be just as happy to hear the stories of that time they were at the Olympic games, as opposed to Grandma trying to share with them a video that was recorded in a format that no current technology can display, because I assume that like every file format that’s preceded it the MP4, the JPEG and the PNG are endangered species.

Even growing up with a Mom who was a shutterbug there are huge chunks of my childhood that are not recorded in any way, and that’s just fine by me. Younger generations might not be aware that pictures, like phone calls, used to cost money. First you had to pay to buy the film to record the pictures on, then you had to pay to get those photos developed so that you could actually see them. Unless you were independently wealthy, you had to be somewhat choosy about just what was photo-worthy. Times were different, and yet just because the vast majority of my youth was not captured on camera doesn’t mean these events didn’t exist. In fact one could argue that actually being in the moment, experiencing it fully and making memories is far richer than any snapshot.

It’s possible that cell phones, like so many of the technological gadgets that preceded them are nothing but a passing fad. I’ve seen firsthand the way the rapid deployment of AI is laying waste to the internet, so it’s not that far-fetched to think that the internet will become as irrelevant as the 3.5 inch floppies that I have sitting in a storage box with some of my earliest short stories on them. But even if mobile phones are here to stay, I urge you to not let them control your life. Get out their and experience things, photos not necessary. Touch some grass, of if you live anywhere near me, some snow.

— Alissa

P.S. In wanton disregard of my own advice I snapped the photo above while in the middle of skiing around the backyard. In my defense it was after trekking up the uphill portion of the yard through the some especially sticky and soggy snow.