Living your life through a lens and missing being in the moment
My latest piece for Stuff.tv is Your smartphone can capture experiences to watch forever, but they shouldn’t be the experience. It was inspired in part by hearing my unborn child’s heartbeat on a hospital visit, being totally in that moment, and then being fortunate enough to record the sound for posterity.
Too often, though, I see people documenting their own lives without actually living them. People spend gigs watching their device screens rather than the event in front of them. Elsewhere, countless photographs end up in digital archives that are never again visited, while the original moment was compromised by the very act of recording it.
Naturally, I’m not suggesting we all stop using smartphones to record things, as I make clear in the article; but as technology becomes increasingly interwoven in our lives, I do hope people will start to question exactly when they should record something—and also whether it really needs recording at all.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume that people aren’t living their lives (or experiencing a concert) just because they’re recording things. People seem perfectly happy while they record a gig, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t seem to detract from their enjoyment of the moment.
Personally, I find that taking a picture of a beautiful sunset doesn’t make the sunset any less beautiful. If anything, literally focusing a camera on it helps me figuratively focus on the moment even more, because I’m spending more time considering its beauty and its progression from moment to moment.
I also don’t think it’s true that people don’t revisit the things they record. On the contrary, I’ve found that when people run out of space on their phones, they would rather stop taking new pictures than delete their old pictures, precisely because they like to go back to old pictures, share them with their friends, or remember moments past.
I’ve found that people will often revisit old pictures when they revisit places they’ve been to earlier, or when they meet up with people that are in these old pictures. I generally enjoy these moments very much; it helps me remember and enjoy details that I would otherwise have forgotten.