Picture This

Today is my wife's and my anniversary. We were married on June 26, 1960. That's fifty-six years. It was a Sunday. Hanging on the wall is a reproduction of the New York Times front page from that date, and the lead story – upper right hand corner – is titled “Senators' Report Scores Handling of U-2 Incident.” Dates me, doesn't it?

But the same front page dates the Times as well. There are two photographs which comprise a little over eleven percent of the front page – one a poor picture of the back of a Cartier employee and a broken window (there had been a theft of jewelry valued at $30,000) and the other an unexciting representation of some Korean protesters in Japan who opposed a security treaty with the United States. The photographs were black and white.

For comparison I looked at the front page of yesterday's paper (May 10, 2016. As you know, I write these essays in advance) and found that there was about twenty-one percent of it covered with color pictures – seven in all – including advertisements. (There were no ads on our wedding day.) Since the Times's first front page photograph appeared in 1909 (its first photo was in 1896) it's safe to say that while there were pictures fifty-six years after we were wed, there was none fifty-six years before. All the editors could provide were packages of a thousand words each. But those words were spelled correctly and grammatically presented. Those were the days, my friend.

Times (“times,” as well as the New York Times) change. And journalism changes. The media we once knew have been replaced by the personal recording of opinions, facts, and photographs by the ubiquitous reporters of our age – us. While newspapers, magazines, radio, and television haven't disappeared, far more attention world-wide is paid to the social media. Billions of people (including journalists and politicians) have accounts on Facebook^®, Twitter^®, and similar carriers. And very many more have cell phones with cameras in their pockets so they can take pictures of everyone and everything around them.

Times, as I said, change. As is frequently the case the changes were initiated by technological advancements and society's response to them. They represent an improvement over prior methods both of documentation and presentation of information. At least that's the way they're sold.

Pictures have been around – or at least documented – for about forty thousand years. The earliest ones we have are cave paintings. There may have been pictures before that (pictures probably predated language) but no archaeological evidence has been found. That won't be a problem for the archaeologists of the future. Quite the opposite. There will be too many pictures – most of them “selfies” by egotistical members of our species, a species likely to change over the millennia. Those related to the news remain active as long as the news cycle, but they're archived along with the text. They last forever. They never disappear.

There seems to be no end of the pictures posted every day on the internet. The pictures, for the most part lacking any significance, have turned social media into an addiction – one that takes away countless hours of boredom and replaces it with countless hours of pointless gazing – have replaced language with visual images – some of which aren't even real. They're “photoshopped.”

Our vocabulary is decreasing to “like,” “don't like,” “how cute, and “hashtag.” And “emogis.” There's a little more to it, but not much. We used to “reach out and touch someone” with inane speech, but now we do so with even more inane, and repetitive, photographs which we transmit as soon as they're taken. Who cares? Apparently a lot of people do, and they devote all their spare time to gawking at what they've been sent by their countless “friends,” often friends whom they've never met. And language becomes even more abbreviated as we move in the direction of one hundred forty character messages. They make a thousand words seem an unnecessary luxury, if not completely wasteful.

But I'm living in the past. That's what happens when you've been married as long as I. And I like it. Sure we have photos taken when our children were young, but the memories are far more evocative. Our imaginations are now disappearing, but we once used them to fill in the gaps, and flavor our fantasies.

And we talked to each other face to face, using full sentences. Where have all the phrases gone?