There’s a lot about the world that seems upside down these days. Over the weekend, a friend of mine articulated something I’d been thinking about for awhile now.

In a time when we have the tools and technology to have clearer and richer audio and better quality cameras than ever before, we’ve all accepted inferior substitutes in the name of sharing.

Everyone has a smart phone now, so you rarely see someone carrying a camera. But that also means you rarely see pictures that are as high quality when people used digital cameras – and nowhere near the images you would see when people captured their images on film.

Likewise, everyone has the music on an iPod or smart phone device, which means we’re mostly listening to mp3s. The only problem is that mp3s are compressed music files and they cut off all of the high and low frequencies, leaving just a shell of the originally intended sound.

And we do this in the name of sharing and convenience. As a society, we’ve made the decision to trade quality for convenience. It’s more important to be able to take pictures of everything – regardless of quality – than to capture a warm image that will last forever.

We take so many pictures these days, it makes you wonder who’s ever going to go back and look at any of them.

It has also changed the way we experience events. Instead of going to a concert and enjoying the performance, half the crowd at any point in the show has their phone up and are watching through their phone than simply using their own eyes.

We’ve become a nation of digital horders. We all have thousands of images and songs and files, but what are we ever going to do with them? Would we ever miss them if we lost them? Would we even know we lost them?

I’m not sure about you, but this makes me want to go back and look at some of my family’s photo albums. (Certainly, you know what a photo album is, right?)

– My name is Jon Friesch, and I still believe in quality over quantity.