Chapter 4: Take & Make (Art of Memory)
10 Insights from the Super Connected Tour: Rebalancing Digital & Analogue Life. Tool Four in the 'Super Connected Toolkit': Take and Make
In some ways it was a small sacrifice for me, but it made a huge difference to stop using an iPhone for calls or taking photos on the tour. I used my Light Phone for calls and a Canon E0S M50 for photos.
As you can see in the photo above, I’ve lost none of the enthusiasm for capturing content, but it does make a difference to having an inconveniently large device to take photos which can not immediately be sent to wherever or to whoever I want to send it in the world. It was part of the intentional slowing down of my digtial life as a I prepared to retire my smartphone (iPhone) for good. After a long time coming, I was prepping to switch permanently to my Light Phone - a device that supports your intentions, not the intentions of a 3rd party advertiser.
But how to get to that stage? How do you begin to be fully intentional with a smartphone, instead of just using it robotically all the time without thinking?
In my efforts to reduce the urge to constantly take photos with my smartphone, before I stopped using a smartphone, I embraced the "Take one, leave one" method.
For every photo I took, I chose not to take the next one. This approach helped me cultivate memory and imagination, allowing me to savour moments without always needing to capture them. By balancing the act of taking pictures with consciously experiencing and remembering other moments, I reawakened a healthier relationship with technology and a deeper appreciation for the present. If you try this, you still end up capturing some moments with the phone, but also make other moments exclusively to live in the mind and memory. I call this practice "Take and Make."
It seems like a pretty small and potentially pointless exercise, but in my experience it was much more profound than I anticipated. If you give it time and really tune in, our human memory is capable of some pretty outstanding graphics!
When we capture photos on our device, we’re committing memories to the phone’s storage system, and it’s well know that when we use a smartphone, we barely have enough time to either look back at photos, print them or categorise them all neatly into albums. Mostly, it’s the activity of capturing that has become important to us with a smartphone. Sharing or broadcasting on social media is standard, but beyond that, we’re mostly just filling up devices with memories that mean very little to the devices.
By choosing intentionally not to capture some of my memories on a device, and only capturing them in my memory to recall at a later date, I find I’m activating my own human storage device. For someone with a photographic memory, this is quite easy.
But if you don’t have a photographic memory, you start to know what kind of memory you do have. Do you see things in pictures or words? What helps to access a particular memory? Is it colour or black and white? How does music work with your memory?
I will take photos for the rest of my life with some kind of camera or another. But I don’t want my brain’s onboard memory recorder to end up in a cupboard.
We each have a truly unique design. We are each the ultimate ‘limited edition’. Capturing content has become possible for anyone, anywhere, any time.
It’s easy to take take take. But it’s more creative to take and make.
Musician and Filmmaker Tim Arnold has researched screen addiction and social media’s effects on mental health since 2017, culminating in the critically acclaimed album, film and theatre show, Super Connected - Nihal Arthanayake, BBC 5 LIVE
Listen to the album here and be among the first to see the film by signing up here.