Why are we always documenting ?
If you were to trace back your family — grandparents, their grandparents and so on, imagine all the different kinds of memorabilia you’d dig through and come across. An old framed family portrait, dusty black and white albums from the loft and if you are lucky — perhaps a painting or a few letters of love. You’ll handle them with utmost care and caution and as you try playing the guessing game of naming your relatives, you’ll notice a glint of pride on your granddads face. Thereon he starts off about his wild encounters as a young man and you’ll realize you opened a treasure chest. Over the years we witnessed the evolving nature of how people choose to document their lives or work. If your ancestors wrote letters, maintained photo albums and sent postcards, today we have Instagram posts, Facebook updates and stories. This indicates one thing more than ever. The need to document has always been an essential need.
The need to capture different moments of our lives isn’t a 17th century discovery but one that has always been within us since the beginning of time. Cavemen carved figures onto walls, not just for mythical narratives but also to remember specific moments. The minute we decide that something significant is going to occur, we try to find one way or the other to capture that moment. But why?
Is it to merely look back and smile? Is it to dig deeper and find out what else you could have done or is it to remember the better days when things get harder? One answer to these questions is that — like during any other day or event, our emotions and feelings perceive some memories as more significant than others. This feeling goes onto shape our behavior, actions and eventually our decision about the need to document or not. There are people who maintain journals on a daily basis, documenting their entire day. But there are others who can only get themselves to write on an awfully sad evening. The need to document largely depends what according to you is worth remembering. But what we can be sure about is that, good or bad, heartbreak or healing, new beginnings or last goodbyes, people want to remember.
Of course, we’ve come a long way since ancestral portraits. With social media as platforms to document just about anything, it’s given the strength and confidence for people unlike any other medium. You still decide what’s worth documenting, but you also love the process in itself. Today we love the concept of choosing what goes on the gram, trying out filters and the added validation after. All of these have met the basic need — our terrible desire to remember everything longer and also made the concept of documenting incredibly interesting.
There are many more reasons behind why humans find the need to document everything. More practical ones- storing important data, books etc, and more humane ones- an evening at the beach, a young mother and her child or meeting old friends. This perhaps makes the need of documentation more special than ever- that it is only our species that will be able to relive bits and pieces of the past, as a Polaroid picture, documentary film or your granddads never ending stories.
By Anjali Bodempudi
Anjali Bodempudi is a media and communications student. She hopes to combine her interest in the fields of media and humanities one day.
