Said Norm MacDonald, 10 years ago, showing a photo of his great-grandfather to David Letterman.
MacDonald is quoted in "The Strange Rise of the Before-and-After Tragedy Meme/Online, people pair ordinary bits of video with news of the life-changing shocks that followed. It can be unnerving — or surprisingly moving" (NYT Magazine).
That's the kind of article that gets my "MSM reports what's in social media" tag.
To do the meme, just display whatever ordinary bit of video you have of someone who died suddenly or got badly hurt and add text like:
“Laughing because I thought he was incredibly uncoordinated in this move, not because he was 2 months away from a terminal diagnosis.”
“He doesn’t know it yet, but he will become completely paralyzed in less than 3 hours. This will be his last morning stretch.”
There's always going to be that last photo you took, so anytime you take a picture of someone, you might want to reflect on whether this might be the one that could work for this meme where you pull on the heartstrings of strangers by slapping on a few words about how, just shortly afterwards, they died.
Smile! — you find yourself saying — This could get a million views if you die later today.
The 10,000th time you use that joke, you've got the clip that works for the meme and you go ahead and leave your joke in the video you post. So ironic!
Or just do it without waiting for your photo subject to die. It's the meme that needs to die.
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34 comments:
"'You want to see 100,000 pictures of my great-grandfather? I got ’em right here! Plus everything he did every day of his life.'"
I have thought about this a lot. It's one of the crazier realizations about modern life. For the first time in human history, hyper-precise images of you - possibly with sound - are available for your far-flung descendants. Historical corollaries (like the Fayum mummy portraits or Moche portrait ceramics) are rare. In 1000 years - despite likely major upheavals and cataclysms because of how durable the mediums are - you could very well have descendants that would be able to look at their actual great grandpa 50+ generations removed smiling back at them...or perhaps doing something less dignified.
I am definitely teaching my kids that the internet is forever, and that if they have to record something, to do so with multiple millennia in mind.
when we cleaned out my Grandma's house, up in the attic there were several large photographs of old people (from about the 1880s)..
My mom was like; "OH we HAVE TO take these home"
and, i said; "WHO ARE THEY?"
and my mom was like, "i don't know, but they must be relatives"
and, i said; "if you DON'T KNOW who they are, they're nothing"
and my mom was like; "But! But! They're relatives!"
so, Serious Question:
What is the value, of an old photo of someone you don't know; that probably is related to you somehow (or not)??
follow on Question: What is the value of:
The 500th selfie?
The 500th picture of the SAME lakeshore?
The 500th picture of the SAME trout stream?
ps i just checked; i have 136 pictures (from 2012 to last week) of the EXACT SAME spot on my favorite stream.
It does make a pretty good slide show, if you click to the next one every 2 seconds)
what i'm getting at, is that EVEN IF the pix have metadata, saying when and where (and who and why)..
In 50 years, people won't know or care.
When you've seen one trout pic.. you've seen them ALL
…the 100,000 Insty/OF pics of great grandma might create some…issues…
When you've seen one trout pic.. you've seen them ALL
…haha! Yes, all angles from our families there’s more pictures of trout than people. It reminded me of one random pic in a family slide deck- a refrigerator, sitting alone on a sand bank next to a flowing river somewhere in the Rockies, beautifully Wes Andersonly framed against the backdrop of mountains and huggers, probably 30 miles from the nearest electricity. WTF? My so says it was for drying the salmon. I can’t believe the bears didn’t maul it…
"when we cleaned out my Grandma's house, up in the attic there were several large photographs of old people (from about the 1880s)..
My mom was like; "OH we HAVE TO take these home"
and, i said; "WHO ARE THEY?"
and my mom was like, "i don't know, but they must be relatives"
and, i said; "if you DON'T KNOW who they are, they're nothing"
and my mom was like; "But! But! They're relatives!""
I have a picture like that and I keep it on the mantle in the living room. I like the photo and I embrace the mystery.
What do you think of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?
"When you've seen one trout pic.. you've seen them ALL"
The worst category of family pix is kids excited about opening Christmas presents (or blowing out birthday cake candles). Just experience these moments as they happen. It's pointless to photograph them.
Take candid photos on ordinary days (and not because you're thinking they'll be great if the person dies soon).
What do you think of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?
With DNA available, is anyone truly unknown? That said, I like the concept. Here's someone who selflessly gave their life. We should honor that.
As the photos recorded, I spent my entire childhood amazed by various presents and cakes. Who knows what real life looked like?
"With DNA available, is anyone truly unknown? That said, I like the concept. Here's someone who selflessly gave their life. We should honor that."
We have no evidence of the unknown dead person's motivations or willingness to die. The context and detail is as unknown as the name.
…we did a merged family photo collage in the hallway. I thought we did pretty well- gandma and friends on skates towed behind the Model A, Grandpa next to the fully loaded logging truck, football uniforms…there was a pic of supposedly a great grandfather that lived in the county jail or something, turns out now that it is on the wall nobody claims him as family. He’s a rando that would upset the balance if he went missing…
…there’s also the couple what came with the silver picture frame, still there years after I set the frame on my night stand…
It happened to me twice. I took a picture of my great-grandmother when I was a kid...four days later she died. After my daughter was born we took a four-generation picture with my grandmother. Three days later she died. I would not partake in the "tragedy meme." Too personal for me, especially with my grandmother. We were very close.
I have five old daguerreotypes and tintypes inherited from a great-aunt who was the family historian. I know who two of them are, as one of them came with a slip of paper taped to the back giving the particulars of the person, while the other can be matched to a later photograph that is known to be of the same individual. The others can actually be dated to within +/-5 years based on what kind of image and the case and frame design. One of them has the studio and city recorded. With that information, and with a rough estimate of the age of each individual pictured, and the records I have of her branch of the family tree, I have narrowed all of them down to two or three plausible candidates. The biggest problem is that families were large, and you never know if the handsome young man in the photo is your 4th great grandfather or his younger brother.
Little Did He Know It Would Be His Last Picnic
True, Hassyhamper. I'm preserving some extraordinary photos of an utopian college from 1915 near an old turpentine camp in Florida. They all wore woolen underclothes, even in summer, to keep the fleas and worse insects off. Bad years, they subsisted on soon-hated persimmons. A creative bunch, there are uniquely casual, for the age, photos of women in intense heat and Victorian garb performing Shakespeare on huge tree stumps. It's impossible to differentiate the huge families. It's like a fairy-land, but they worked hard, farmed, pulled stumps, studied hard, and lived in unbelievable conditions.
gilbar said...
"so, Serious Question:
What is the value, of an old photo of someone you don't know; that probably is related to you somehow (or not)??"
Even if it's no perceived value to you, it may be important to your kids, or cousins, or researchers. I do genealogy for my family (and some assorted relatives), and every clue is a potential link to chase dead ancestors, who can be amazingly elusive for dead people.
The unknown past has value. You just remember, or to put it more clearly imagine, the people in the old photographs in a different way. I have a small rock with a fossilized trilobite in it. Forget generations away, late little fellow is millions of years away from me. Whenever events overwhelm me and I mistake myself and my problems as being the center of the universe I'll ponder the rock imprint of that creature. It was an entity in its day, swimming in its ocean and doing whatever trilobites did.
I found this photograph,
underneath the broken picture glass.
Tender face of black and white,
Beautiful, a haunting sight.
Looked into an angel's smile,
captivated all the while.
From the hair and clothes she wore,
I'd place her in between the wars.
"Photograph"
- R.E.M., Natalie Merchant
BTW, I am hanging onto an extremely old family album (circa 1800s) because one young man in his wedding picture is the spitting image of my grandson. Well, I guess my grandson is the spitting image of the young groom. Why, why, why didn't they write names on the back of photos in those days?
I got rid of hundreds of old photos a few years ago, the ones that sit in boxes in the little drug store photo center envelope and you only ever look at them when you're getting ready to move and you go through them for an hour or so and think maybe you should get rid of them because you never look at them but then decide to keep them anyway because maybe just knowing they're in a box somewhere is a comforting thought that your past is still sort of here somewhere.
I ended up scanning ones I thought were interesting or of people who were no longer with us and dumped them to Facebook, hoping they will live on in the aether for a long time.
One thing I learned from going to estate sales is that NO ONE wants other people's old photographs.
"Who knows what real life looked like? "
I have recently been digitizing all of my old photos. Mundane photos of where we lived or what we drove, were rare and interesting. Photos cost money back then. Even with ubiquitous camera phones, people don't take photos of everyday life.
Take some photos at work, maybe eating lunch. What does your garage look like? Does any normal adult have a photo of their bedroom? The real-life stuff changes, but slowly. You may want to look back.
The Tragedy meme that the NYT is promoting, sounds ghastly.
How much energy is it going to take to keep everything online and everything that will be online available? Won't the whole thing eventually collapse? Or will we use the energy needed to get us off the earth to preserve the 10,000 pictures and posts of us?
Back in 2021, I visited Seul Choix Point Lighthouse on the south side of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. They have a small museum run by the Gulliver, Michigan Historical Society, with pictures of local politicians and baseball teams from decades ago. In the back room, on a bottom shelf, I saw an interesting picture of a young woman dressed all in white, in a dress that I guessed was late 19th Century. She was holding a parchment scroll in her hand, which was her high school graduation diploma. I was able to make out her name (Lillie C. Smith) and the school, Marine City High School, which is on the eastern coast of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. I was able to use Ancestry to find her college picture at the Michigan State Normal School (Now Eastern Michigan University) in Ypsilanti, which was a teachers' college at the time. Then I found other records on her marriage and children, as well as a picture of her family's home in Detroit and another of her standing behind a vintage Ford, probably some time in the 1920s. It was a mystery that I was able to solve. You don't need a name on the back of the picture if it is on the front! Interestingly, she was born in 1876 and died in 1961, the same years as one of my great-grandmothers who lived in northwest Ohio.
This is the picture of Lillie Smith that I saw at the museum. You can't read the name or school on this picture, but I also zoomed in for a closeup of the diploma in a separate picture, which I used for my sleuthing when I got home from Michigan.
https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipNFZHdZKLWaUinLHwkiU7hI_nLhZdWvWPeWkY9s
I never did figure out how her picture ended up in that museum, since as far as I can tell, she lived in the Lower Peninsula her whole life. Her husband, H.O. Smith, was a marine engineer who served for 39 years on the Great Lakes freighter John Dunn, Jr. It's possible that he might have left it ashore there. And yes, Smith was both her maiden name and her married name.
Can't believe you've missed this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nevdSt_2PIM
All I've got is a photograph and I realize you're not coming back anymore. At 74, and as the youngest of my family, this means a lot to me.
This post reminds me of that tragedy.
My mother has a photo of her grandfather wearing a white shirt, suspenders, a tie and a hat, standing outside with a snow shovel. No jacket, there is snow on the ground, he was shoveling before posing for the photo. Who puts on a tie to shovel snow? I love that old photo, though he was dead long before I was born.
"What do you think of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?"
I recall the old National Lampoon Radio Hour bit about drilling for oil in Arlington National Cemetery. "At no point, was any effort made to find the identity of the Unknown Soldier." LOL
I must be the only one here with no photos of my grandparents. I have very few of my parents and my siblings.
While clearing out the hoard at my mother's house, I found some photos of people dating to the late 1890s / early 1900s. No names, but there are a few people with clear family resemblances, including a young man who looked like my 25 year old nephew traveled back in time to pose for the photo. It's almost creepy...it reminded me of the photo with Jack Nicholson's character at the end of The Shining.
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