Analog's twilight: Digital trumps physical

By Ted Anthony

updated 4:02 p.m. ET Oct. 14, 2008

Sometimes, in the decades after he came home from World War II, it seemed as if the movie camera was surgically attached to Christoffel Teeuwissen's hand.

He carried it everywhere, trained it on everything. When they widened the street in front of his house in Florida, there he was. When a septic tank was installed in West Virginia, there he was. High school football games, construction sites, the building of a swimming pool — there he was, camera in hand.

Film ebbed into video, and he kept recording. When the VCR arrived on the scene, history programs joined the collection, as did episodes of "The Lawrence Welk Show" and TV biographies of Glenn Miller.

Then, in 2005, Christoffel Teeuwissen died at 88. And when Jon Teeuwissen and his two sisters began going through their parents' ranch house, another story unfolded.

All over the house, behind each closet door, sat boxes of memories — dozens of 7-inch reels of film, smaller reels of shorter clips, Super 8s, audio recordings, VHS cassettes.

So Christoffel Teeuwissen's children inventoried. They labeled. They assembled the recorded remains of their father's time on Earth into what coherence they could. And then they put everything into boxes and sent it all off to an address in Arizona.

There, courtesy of a company called iMemories Inc., the dusty personal archives of the Teeuwissen family are losing their physicality. Bit by bit, they are becoming DVDs and JPEGs and online videos searchable with a click.

And with that, for Jon Teeuwissen, as for so many people in a new millennium brimming with computerized wonders, the march toward digital remembrances — away from the tactile ones we kept in the 20th century — is under way.

Things fall apart
Paper burns. Videotape decays. Negatives rot. Slides fade into seas of midcentury yellow and orange. LPs scratch. Cassettes become too tightly wound. And even if you're a big fan of Foghat, 8-track tapes might as well be images from a 19th-century stereopticon, for all the good they'll do you these days.

The ways we have recorded our personal footprints — on paper and tape and plastic, things we could hold in our hands — are forever stalked by the ticking clock. That slow erosion is even more poignant when you consider that, today, we don't have everything we might have saved. We had to choose which tokens to keep, based on what our wallets and our filing cabinets could accommodate.

The Information Age is changing all that. From the aisles of Best Buy to the pages of the SkyMall catalog, everywhere are gadgets that will transfer the trappings of personal existence into bits of data that are portable, reproducible and potentially infinite.

Sometimes cultural moments arrive stealthily. One of those is at hand. Memories, in all their forms, are shedding their containers and bursting forth into a new phase — and with them, our images of ourselves. This is analog's twilight.

"We get fast food and we get instant information online. Everything is at our fingertips," says Jennafer Martin, editor-in-chief of Digital Scrapbooking magazine. "So it makes a little bit of sense that our memories should be, too."

This is not solely a tale of technology, though it is fueled by staggering progress. It is a story about how we interact with the items that surround us, and what it means when they change. It is about our hope that, through fire or flood or theft, the things we value will be around not only for our lifetimes but for our children's.

Paper, of course, isn't going anywhere just yet. There's too much of it around. But the last decade has fundamentally altered how we capture things and preserve moments in time.

Film cameras are now a niche market, and a digital camera can be bought for $19.95. Scanmyphotos.com will turn your entire stash of 1980s Fotomat prints into JPEGs. ITunes is so entrenched that we forget we once had to go to the record store. Your "inbox" now means e-mail, not some wooden container with letters on your desktop (which also means something digital).

Polaroid instant cameras? Buh-bye. Bound books? Google is digitizing more than 3,000 a day. And between 2001 and 2006, sales of blank cassettes dropped by more than 60 percent as flash memory sales spiked, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, which predicts "a slow, steady death for blank audio and video cassettes."

The SkyMall catalog, available in airplane seat pockets, can outfit your entire house with devices to move your vinyl to CD, your CDs to MP3, your videocassettes to DVD and your slides and prints to JPEG.

SkyMall, which targets business travelers and "early adopters," is a showcase for "products that are at the early stage of their life cycle," says Christine Aguilera, SkyMall's CEO. "We have a ton of buyers out there looking for the product that consumers don't know they need yet."

Fujitsu's goal is nothing less than helping us get rid of our paper. Its ScanSnap, a scanner shaped like a printer, can transform the morasses of wood pulp that are out of sync with the encroaching digital world. You can load 50 sheets, push a button and walk away; when you come back, PDF files will be waiting.

It's not new technology. Fujitsu is just framing the device as a "lifestyle product" and pushing the mind-set that physical documents like bills, newspaper clippings and random notes can be unwieldy. Shrewdly, the pitch is gentle: "Go digital — where you want to."

"I don't think you can expect people to make a significant or radical transition in one step. It's got to be done over time," says Scott Francis, marketing director for Fujitsu Computer Products of America. His hard drive contains 6,750 PDF scans, including images of his kid's schoolwork that wouldn't all fit on the refrigerator.

Put this all together and what do you have? Your computer contains the digital equivalent of you. And because this customizable photo album-movie viewer-stereo counts storage "space" as a virtual term — and because access to the contents are instant — our digital memories are way more complete than our physical archives ever were.

In your digital life, packrattery won't crowd you out of your house. Sixteen variants of the same digital photo are fine, because you don't have to print them. Movies downloaded from Amazon don't require shelves crowded with the black plastic of VHS. And if you're scanning documents, you might well catch yourself saving pieces of paper that you might otherwise — perish the thought — throw away.

"If I've got a 120-gigabyte hard drive," Francis says, "I'm going to save that extra rendition of `Free Bird.'"

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