Authenticity is in authentic...?

My dad and I were discussing the digi prints from our time in France. He explained that the more and more we remove ourself from the original image (like after taking the picture, the transport of file from camera to computer, to internet, to new computer, to email, to drugstore, to printing), the more and more the quality of the picture decreases. Makes perfect enough sense, right? Right. So how does this translate into other aspects of the photo, of our memory of a trip or an event, and ulitmately to our lives? The more and more I distnace myself from the image--by the way I talk about the photo, about the event, how I live my life today, how I think about the memory and continue to distort as I move into the future either conciously or not...I'm going to leave this question to the scholars.

I've decided to distance myself from the phenom of online albums (which is totally inauthentic if I have a blog, but at least I have an authentic awareness of my behavior), so I have started organizing photos from the trip in both an album (pleather) and gold frames I bought from Salvation with fellow blogger Ellen Swiss. No gimicky scrapbooks, no digital frames, no plastic--100% metal or wood, and 100% my photos. No copyright infringement, and all mine.