When I was a kid, my dad took one or two backpacking trips a year to Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior or the nearby Porcupine Mountains. Despite traveling the same terrain year after year, he always returned with several rolls of film to develop. Many of these, he had developed as slides and from time to time he would haul out a large screen, set up a projector in our living room, and subject us to what felt like interminable hours of looking at images of lakes, trails, plants. So many plants. Sometimes there would also be fish, birds, and when we were very lucky, moose. As a child who lived surrounded by 10 acres of woods, pictures of plants were not terribly interesting to me.

This past July, I told a friend about my plan to take a break from Facebook for the month of August and we talked about the pros and cons of doing so. She was about to leave for a trip to Maine with her kids and said “I feel like if I don’t post my pictures on vacation, it wasn’t a real trip.” She didn’t elaborate much, but she is not a shallow person. I don’t think she posts the pictures out of a need for validation – though who among us isn’t seeking some level of validation every time we share something? Primarily, I think she wants to share the experience. I have loved photos she shared on trips past and have even been inspired to think more seriously about traveling to Alaska because of them.

At my house, we’ve been watching The Sopranos this summer. I love taking in all the late nineties / early aughts fashion and quintessential New Jersey decor. It’s fun to see all the flip phones and CD players and remember what life was like before Apple put tiny computers in our pockets. But one thing really caught my nostalgic heart strings: in a handful of episodes, the characters pull out fat yellow, black, and red envelopes, remove a stack of photographs and look through them together. One person’s new house. A trip to Italy. I remembered doing that, how we’d bring pictures to one another’s homes and sit down to review them and share stories about them as we went.

A few years ago, news of a study done by an insurance company in the UK said that 73% of people don’t like seeing other people’s vacation photos on social media. Personally, I don’t have a strong feeling one way or another, but I think that my sudden nostalgia for printed pictures and this study may have something in common: what we’ve lost in this transition to digital photos and distribution via social media is the one-on-one connection point. The most meaningful part of sharing your pictures, or looking at someone else’s, is the context – it’s hearing or reliving the stories that go with them and that only really matters to those closest to us. It occurs to me now that when a close friend goes on vacation, I look at the pictures they post online and then we may talk about the trip briefly after they get back, but it’s not the same. Looking at the pictures while talking about the event would yield more stories and more conversation.

We also have a different version of slide shows now, and I love them. They are sometimes set to music and they almost always make me cry. They are digitally displayed on tables at weddings and graduations and funerals. I’m sure that the time spent creating them is its own kind of joy and they show the best moments of our lives. They are also highly curated and while they invoke emotion and memory, I’m not sure they evoke conversation. I don’t think they generate the kind of (possibly) mundane connection that the old way of sharing pictures did.

One of the last slide shows my Dad did before the world went digital surprised us all. Several of my older siblings were home for some event or holiday, with spouses and significant others in tow. I think we all expected the slides to be the usual: flowers, plants, trails, lakes. (More plants.) But instead there were old pictures of holidays past. We were all delighted. But the thing none of us has forgotten was a Christmas morning shot from the early-seventies, with my parents and 4 eldest siblings gathered in front of the Christmas tree, big smiles on all their faces. We all giggled about the haircuts and pajamas and then my brother’s girlfriend (who was newly introduced to all of us) yelped and whispered something into my brother’s ear. He let out a huge laugh and pointed out to the rest of us what she’d noticed: in the photo, now showing on a large screen in front of all of us, my brother who was between 4 and 6 at the time, stood with a goofy grin, and his privates hanging out of his pajamas.

That slide show is now a shared family memory that cannot help but make us laugh. And it never would have happened if my dad hadn’t forced us all into the living room to sit down and look at the photos he had gathered. It’s been at least 25 years since we sat in that room and though some of the details are fuzzy, I remember very clearly being surrounded by family and laughing until we all cried. That doesn’t happen on Facebook.

I think we should bring back slide shows like that. When we can go on vacation or have big weddings and gather in our living rooms again, we should cast our digital albums to our TVs, sit around with snacks and flip through them leisurely, sharing stories and laughs and whatever other conversation unfolds. As we approach 6 months of limited social activity, nothing sounds as dreamy to me right now than a boring slide show in my living room with people I love.