Pen down holiday memories

The writer turned to poetry and found a richer way to record his travels. Experts warn that taking photos may impede memories

- Daniel Seifert

The writer's first post-Covid-19 trip was to Copenhagen, Denmark.

I was a late bloomer, tech-wise. I got my first smartphone only in 2012, and within weeks, something strange happened to my attention span.

That year, I remember coming home from a gig at Fort Canning Park, where I had watched British indie-rock band Kasabian thrill the howling crowd. Or had I?

With a smartphone camera glued to my hand, I was more concerned about updating my Facebook feed than staying in the moment. I left the concert with dozens of photos, but few memories of the event itself.

This zombification is a common enough complaint in an age when collecting snapshots has become an automatic reflex to any kind of beauty.

Even in 2013, when mobile phone cameras were a far more pixelated affair than today’s models, experts warned that taking photos might impede people’s memories.

In a study published that year, American author and cognitive psychologist Linda Henkel wrote that people “count on the external device of the camera to ‘remember’ for them.”

That is how I started feeling about my travels a few years ago - like I was outsourcing my memories to the cloud, one megapixel at a time. I realised part of me was flying halfway around the world simply to record my time, not live it.

Growing up as the child of expatriate parents who lived in Hong Kong, the Netherlands and Bangkok before settling in Singapore, I was lucky enough to travel both with my family and on my own to see the Great Wall of China, the shimmering lines of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and a Cambodian sunrise painting the ruins of Angkor Wat.

But gradually, the camera glued to my hands became a barrier instead of an enabler. Head down, gaze narrowed, I fretted over the screen to get the perfect shot.