LARRY BURRIS, Post Columnist
Posted: Sunday, August 29, 2010 7:41 am

How many of you remember the Elvis Presley song, “Memories”?

Or the Jim Croce song, “Photographs and Memories”?

Or the Glen Campbell song, “Dreams of an Everyday Housewife”?

All of these songs have something in common: They all talk about memories, things we remember from our past.

But you know what, numerous studies have shown that our memories are generally wrong, particularly when it comes to details.

Sure, you may remember where you went on vacation, or the good time you had in school, but as for the details; well, the longer in the past, the more our memories may not match reality.

And that’s OK.

We have our memories, they are generally good, and the details probably don’t matter a whole lot anyway.

For many people, memories are in collections of photographs.

Go get out your old photo album and take a look at the pictures.

I bet most of them are of family and friends at special occasions: birthday parties, days at the beach, weddings.

I bet there aren’t very many of them – maybe just one or two from each event – and they probably don’t bring back many details.

Now, get out your photo album from last week.

Oh, wait, I bet you don’t have a photo album from last week.

I bet you have a computer disc with last week’s photographs.

And I bet there are dozens and dozens of pictures.

But there is something deeper going on here besides a lot of pictures: Our lives are becoming much more documented than ever before.

Everyone has a camera phone that can take both still and motion pictures.

Those images are then stored away pretty much forever, and are, in a manner of speaking, set in cement.

Those images will become our memories.

They will document almost every aspect of our lives, but do we really want that much certainty?

Personally I like my memories the way they are.

At some level I know things weren’t quite like I remember them today.

I know the stories have gotten embellished, the funny moments have become funnier, and the bad times now don’t seem quite so bad.

But in a few years all of these new photographs, the documentation, may rob us of some of our humanity by creating an indelible, unchangeable image of the way things were.

In his 1940 novel “You Can’t Go Home Again,” Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame . . . back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

The new technologies may preserve more precise memories, but I sometimes wonder what will be the cost.