An Austrian company is putting QR codes on gravestones so friends/family of the departed can view a digital catalogue of their lives.
Now, cemeteries will be another place to whip out your phone and start pointing & shooting & watching to gain an “experience.” Maybe I’m too cynical on this one, but the cemetery is no place for an emerging experience.
Neat(ish) idea. Just seems too insensitive for me.
“Let’s look at the memories” vs. “Let’s remember the memories.” This is how I interpret this move and I suppose, this is the crux of my uneasiness of this – technology makes things too easy, to the point of enabling laziness. We don’t put half of our brain to use because we can rely on technology to do it for us. This fundamental notion of storing things away in our brain to call back on in times of despair or joy – these memories – is being dulled by technology that enables us to store it and ignore it.
Who knows? This might be the way of the future, even in cemeteries. I wouldn’t be surprised. But it sure doesn’t make me feel good.
I agree with you – it’s a little extreme. But then again, what if by digitizing memories you can transform them into lasting legacies? And as we age, we tend to forget lost loved ones – who they were, what they looked like, what they enjoyed about their lives. Being able to capture, digitize and permanently store those memories is a pretty powerful notion to me.
Hi Bana – thanks for stopping by and your comment. Agree with the fundamental value in digitizing memories. But I guess I have more of a problem in this case of context – to call up those memories in a place other than a cemetery could be completely appropriate. But in a cemetery, it just seems jarring and weird.