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.