Analog’s twilight: Slowly, digital trumps physical

October 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.

Written by Admin · Filed Under software 

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