What digital can’t quite reach

During a house inspection yesterday, I spotted a collection of old slides: Bali, the Seychelles, Tahiti... all labeled by hand with the year. The lovely old homeowners told me the photos were from many years of traveling around the world together. They started talking about how digital media will never be quite the same as physical media. Even though they were almost twice my age, I fully agreed. There’s a different kind of bond when it comes to real objects. A connection with the past in ways that the intangible cannot quite match. It takes you to places in the same way that walking barefoot on dew-wet grass in the morning can throw you back to childhood. In my case, that was a childhood when digital photography was pure fiction. Is that why I feel so much more strongly about the tangible? Maybe, but I hope not. I hope that touch and feel will always add an extra sense of what it means to be human.