ShareThisPolaroid, the inventor of "instant photography," next year will stop producing film for its instant cameras, having decided to concentrate entirely on digital photography and printing. The company, once synonymous with New England high-technology in its 1950s-80s incarnation, presumably believes that its decision makes eminent good sense businesswise, but it's regrettable nonetheless.For one thing, those digital prints just can't be compared to the joy of creating a nice shiny piece of film in less than a minute with a Polaroid. And who wants to worry all the time about computer files? Indeed, we suspect that many people are heartily sick of computers! (Recent reports suggest that traffic growth is slowing on the likes of Facebook, etc.)For another, Polaroid instant film is still used for some medical and industrial applications.And then there's that the demise of the film means one more group of physical pictures won't be archived. Digitally archived pictures and printed material are much more vulnerable to the ravages of time than are the physical things, assuming they are properly stored.Author Nicholson Baker has written eloquently about the effects that our delirious digitalization is having on the protection of our cultural legacy. The relentless obsolescence of computer systems and the way that computer hardware and CDs degrade fast will relegate much current stuff that people would like to look at in 10 years to oblivion. The effect of digitalization on research libraries is particularly regrettable.The demise of Polaroid film is yet another small nail in the coffin of our cultural legacy. But business is business. Let's hope that some cultural hero does a licensing deal with Polaroid so that someone else will continue to produce the film. They'll have some customers for quite a few years into the future.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Instant-film oblivion
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