My dad found an old grainy video of my brother and me when we were about 7 and 8 years old doing – what else? – some wrestling on a lawn. He had it converted from 8 mm to a DVD and titled it “Yesterday.”

There we were, these silent figures moving on the washed-out film. It has a kind of ghostly look, almost like two restless spirits tussling on the grass. We appeared to know the camera was on us, looking at the lens and hamming it up in between poorly executed hammerlocks.

I found it fascinating to watch, at least partly because such artifacts are rare. I found it odd to see what I looked like in the past when I was in motion. Of course I have seen enough pictures, but I don’t have access to videos of myself.

Things are different now. Kids growing up today will have hundreds if not thousands of videos of themselves that they will be able to watch at the touch of a finger. Many events and aspects of their lives will have been captured, usually by adoring amateur videographers who place them at the center of every frame.

What might this mean to their sense of and understanding of themselves? What might it mean in the way that they see who they are to the rest of the world?

In their view, they will be able actually to see who they were and how they operated – in their memories of youth, these moving images will help fill in the scene.

I have these terribly inaccurate memories of my youthful self. Did you ever revisit a site of your childhood exploits? How small that sledding hill is? How near to civilization those wild woods are? How short the field you played football on really is? The past seems to stretch them all out, expanding distance and to some extent even time. Unless we have that chance encounter with hill or woods or field, we fill in the rest with untrustworthy memories.

In that old 8 mm video, which was shot by the first polymath I think I ever met, an interesting old guy named Jim Ploucher whom my grandmother worked for as a caretaker, I see a flitting glimpse of me. I get a little trailer of a movie about a long-past childhood that was, ultimately, never filmed.

Many children today may get almost the whole movie. I wonder what that will do to their sense of self-narrative? What will their imaginations of self, their views of who they are, be when they have had so much access to artifacts that show them what in fact it really looked, and perhaps was, like?

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.

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