Cropped Memories

September 20th, 2016

English Comp108 Paper Assignment 2

Cropped Memories

Pictures can fill empty voids of the unseen emotions and wants of human beings. Some pictures are manufactured in the mind, yet most are selected out of a developed roll of Kodak moments. With today’s technology it is easy to cut out an unwanted face from a picture without a pair of scissors. People can even save an original photo before an individual can cut out and crop, just in case you decide to love him or her again in the future! Technology has given the human race the freedom to take pictures and modify them at the command of a fingertip.

Sherry Turkles’ passage, lets readers understand her lifelong mission with photos and memories of her absent father. She most importantly gave readers, an example of how her own life story, in which can be interpreted as the study of how important photography’s are to human beings. Pictures in the physical or technological form, are like an external drive to our memories. Such as in photo albums, where the individual selects photos, thus it can be concluded that the same concept goes with selecting our memories. The human mind tends to select and crop certain pictures that stay within our memory. Sometimes this happens when humans want to suppress unwanted memories, or makeup for absent memories. On the downside, photographs can fool the human memory, because humans tend to understand the images as captured frozen moments. Depending on these images lets the human memory dismisses other details of events that have happened.

Personally, when I take pictures I rather take plenty so that not too much is missed. I have many pictures from my childhood, which can tell my life story up to the age of 8. Like Sherry Turkle wrote about her upbringing without her father, I too had a similar childhood without my biological mother and only a picture that was given to me plus the information I needed. Turkle on the other hand had many more pictures of...