G.O.D. (Good Ol' Days)

Recently I saw an installment in the HBO series When It Was a Game, which is a nostalgic look back at baseball in the pre-modern era. The episode centered around the 1950s, with the continued racial integration of the leagues and the expansion to the west with the moves of the Dodgers and Giants. However, what struck me was how, despite the existence of television during that time, the footage used in the episode was clearly home movies, likely shot by individuals who happened to be inclined to take their Super 8 camera to the stadium in those days.

I'm not suggesting the producers were too lazy to find the actual TV footage from the day. I found they in fact sought out this home movie footage because it gave a different perspective than the images that were on TV in those days (and which is much better known now). And I imagine it took some effort to track down these home movies, given that they'd be decades old, and thus it would not only be a matter of locating (presumably in private collections) the films but also finding ones that were still in usable condition.

If decades from now someone is to put together a show about baseball in the first years of the century and wanted to seek out privately shot footage (as opposed to the copious amounts of TV footage), presumably that future producer will need only search through the myriad videos that will undoubtedly be posted on the whatever the future equivalent of YouTube happens to be (which may, in fact, still be YouTube). It won't be so much a matter of who kept reels of film safely in proper storage but who bothered to upload to a site where the servers were always backed up. Well, those who tagged their video appropriately so it could be found in searches.

It's not that finding video footage of what is present day will be difficult to track down in the future; with as much as is already available online, compounded with all that will be shot and uploaded in the years between now and that point in the future, the tricky part will be sifting through all of it to locate what actually applies to the topic in an appropriate way (basically, what was shot at a usable resolution, is in focus, where the camera is held reasonably steady, etc.).

It won't be that we'll be any less nostalgic in the future, but the children of the 21st century won't have any difficulty remembering all they lived through; it will be immediately accessible at any moment.

If they can find what they're looking for.

There will come a time when children will not be able to remember a time when we couldn't instantly remember our childhoods.

~

Unless the complete collapse of technology-driven society occurs before that theoretical future point.