Digital love?

As someone who has only experienced 20 years of being single, I have no more authority to write a typical Valentine’s Day column than I have interest in writing one. Suffice it to say, I will not be writing said hokey column.\nI’ll be instead, on this day of love, asking you to join me in mourning a fallen love: my dear sweet Polaroid Camera, the latest casualty to our disposable, pixilated, digital era. \nModern, technologically-savvy enthusiasts, fear not. Especially today, it will be easy for most of the coupled, happy, contemporary world to write me off as a bitter, anachronistic spinster-in-the-making who lives alone with a cat – or in my case a goldfish (A goldfish that died on Monday. Thanks for asking.)\nStill, I couldn’t quite milk 500 words on the death of my goldfish, and that’s why this column will be mourning my favorite iconic camera instead.\nPolaroid instant film will be unavailable after 2009; this could be our last Valentine’s Day together. \nAfter the news hit, instant film has been flying off the shelves, leading me to believe this may really be the end. What kind of world will it be if I can still buy new ribbon for my typewriter – a device admittedly much more eccentric than a Polaroid – but instant film is no more? \nPolaroids may not have a touch screen, but they have a good personality. They may no longer be the cutting edge of film technology but they have a lot more character than the pixilated images of the future. \nUnlike short-lived fads – car phones, Furbys and Members Only jackets – Polaroid cameras have a true following. I share my heartache with “an estimated 28 million enthusiasts around the world.” \nRecent digital technology has brought us some wonderfully invaluable things, like electronic music and Wikipedia. The Internet has even empowered millions of egotistic idiots like me to blog about anything– from everything to nothing at all. I like what digital technology does, though I can’t pretend to be particularly fond of using it – and it doesn’t seem to like me much either, so that seems fair enough. But digital photography is beginning to cross the line. \nThere is nothing special about a digital image. If your MacBook crashes, if you lose your memory card, if you right-click incorrectly or check the wrong box, you could lose that image forever – if it was ever really there to begin with. There isn’t anything real about digital images. Don’t tell me you get them printed out at CVS, I don’t buy that line. \nYou can’t flip through digital photo books on a coffee table. You can’t write funny things across the white-rimmed bottom with a sharpie. And odds are you will quickly forgot what desktop folder you even put them in. \nThe good news? Everything is going digital, so if you’re already tired of this column, find it online and drag it into that little wire trash can icon, so it can dissolve into a million digital scraps of coded whatever along with the disposable pictures that are replacing my celluloid hopes and dreams.