The Home Videos We Never Meant to Keep

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There was a time when recording a video felt like an event. You'd get out the

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camcorder, someone would immediately tell everyone to smile,

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and the person holding the camera would stand there, usually for far too long,

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while everyone else tried to work out what they were supposed to do.

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Then, eventually, the camera would go away and everyone would get back to whatever they were doing.

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For a long time, that's what home video meant. Christmas mornings,

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birthdays, family holidays, school concerts, weddings, The things we thought we'd want to remember.

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But something changed when video became easier to record. The cameras got smaller,

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the storage got better, and eventually you didn't need to think quite so hard

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about whether something was important enough to film.

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Suddenly, we weren't just recording the big moments, we were recording the ordinary ones too.

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Someone making dinner. A child playing in the garden. A dog doing something

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silly. A conversation that nobody thought would matter.

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A summer afternoon that seemed completely unremarkable at the time.

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And perhaps that's one of the strangest things technology gave us.

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The ability to keep things we didn't know we'd want to remember.

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There's something very different about an old home video compared with an old photograph.

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A photograph gives you a moment. A video gives you movement.

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A voice. Background noise. Someone walking through the room.

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A door opening, or the sound of people talking who may not be around anymore.

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And that can be the thing that gets you. You hear someone's voice.

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Not the voice you remember, but their actual voice. The way they laughed.

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The little things they used to say.

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The way they used to call your name.

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Suddenly, something that happened 20 years ago doesn't feel quite so far away.

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But home video wasn't always like that. For a long time, recording video was a bit of a production.

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The camcorder was big, the batteries didn't last forever, the tapes cost money,

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a lot of money, and somebody had to make the decision to actually get the camera out.

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So you tended to record things that felt important. You were documenting an occasion.

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You were making a record of something worth keeping.

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And I think that's why some of these old family videos feel so deliberate.

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The camera was there because something was happening.

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And then, digital video started changing that.

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Digital cameras and smaller camcorders made recording much easier.

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There was no tape to worry about in quite the same way, and you could see what

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you'd captured almost immediately.

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And eventually, there was less reason to think too hard about whether something

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was worth recording. You just pressed a button.

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And that changed what we recorded.

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The camera started appearing in the moments between the moments.

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The things that wouldn't necessarily have seemed important enough to document before.

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A child saying something funny. A friend messing around. Someone cooking.

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A family member telling a story.

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The sort of thing that would normally disappear as soon as it happened.

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Except, now it didn't have to.

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It could sit on a memory card. A mini-DV tape. A hard drive.

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Or, eventually, on a cloud account.

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And years later, you could still find it.

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And that's where something interesting happened. Because we weren't necessarily

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trying to create memories, we were just keeping pieces of everyday life.

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And we had no idea which pieces we'd eventually wish we still had.

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And I think that's what makes old home videos so powerful. The person holding

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the camera probably wasn't thinking about 20 years from now.

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They weren't deliberately creating an emotional time capsule.

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They were just recording what was happening.

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And that's exactly why the footage feels so honest.

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Nobody knew which moments would become important, the camera just happened to be there.

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When you watch that footage years later, you don't really care about the thing being recorded.

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You care about everything around it. The room, the furniture,

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the clothes, the sound of the television in the background.

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The way someone looked before you'd even realised you'd miss seeing them.

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It's ordinary details that nobody thought to preserve because they were simply

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part of everyday life. Then home video became even easier.

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The cameras got smaller, the storage got larger and eventually the phone became

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the camera. Now almost everyone could record almost anything.

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The barrier had disappeared. You didn't have to decide whether something was

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important enough to film, you just filmed it.

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And we started sharing these moments too. Email, personal websites,

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early social networks, messaging, platforms built almost entirely around photos

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and video. The home video stopped being something that lived in a cupboard and

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became something that could travel.

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A clip could be recorded in the morning and watched by someone on another side

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of the world that afternoon.

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That was a pretty big change.

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But something else happened along the way. We stopped thinking about videos

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as things we would keep and started thinking about them as things we would share.

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And there's a difference.

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Today, most of us probably have more video of our lives than any generation before us.

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Thousands of photographs, hundreds of videos, entire years of our lives sitting

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on phones, hard drives and cloud servers.

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And yet, I wonder how much of that we'll actually go back and watch.

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Because recording something and remembering something aren't quite the same thing.

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A video can preserve a moment perfectly, but it can't tell you what that moment

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meant. That's something only memory does.

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And perhaps that's why these old home videos still feel different.

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They were often imperfect. The camera shook.

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Someone walked in front of the lens. The audio was terrible.

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The footage might be overexposed.

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But when you find one years later, none of that matters. Because you're not

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really watching a video. You're watching a piece of your life.

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A room that doesn't exist anymore. A person who's changed. A voice you haven't heard in years.

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A version of yourself you'd almost forgotten.

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And maybe that's the real artifact. Not the tape. Not the camera.

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Not even the video itself.

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It's the ordinary moment that nobody knew would become important.

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And there's something comforting about that.

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Because we can't possibly know which moments are going to matter to us years from now.

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At the time, they're just Tuesday afternoon. Just a family dinner.

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Just someone laughing in the kitchen.

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Just a child saying something ridiculous. But those are the moments we end up

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wishing we could have back.

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And that's what technology gave us when it made recording everyday life so easy.

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Not perfect memories, but fragments. Little pieces of ordinary life that managed to survive.

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And that's why an old home video can feel so much more important than the technology that created it.

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The camera was only over there to record what was happening.

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The real artifact is the life that happened in front of it.

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I'm Danny Brown and this is Artifacts.