The president of the United States had hardly set foot into the J.W. Isenhour Tennis Center this past January when a firestorm of glowing screens materialized above the arms and heads of an exhilarated N.C. State audience. It was as this enthused assemblage fought for the airspace to effectively wield their video-recording smartphones—and yes, even laptop computers—that I felt a surge of annoyance toward what has become an expected practice of digitally cementing the unforgettable to ensure its future remembrance.
The temptation to press “record” in our mobile-device world is an admittedly explainable desire under circumstances of momentous historic importance. But what about the regular occurrences that comprise our everyday lives?
Even the most inactive social-media user can attest to the propensity for people to document seemingly trivial occurrences. From Instagram filtered photos of last night’s dinner to tweets about tomorrow’s grocery list, there is no shortage of attempts to capture and immortalize the present under the auspices of an all-serving, all-consuming cloud.
But rooted within the desire to document our decisions and drudgeries prevails a fear for the present or, more precisely, a fear for losing the present’s memories to the inevitable future.
In our efforts to digitally preserve meaningful glimpses of our lives, we ironically forego being truly present to experience the moments we seek to capture as our attention is divided between participation and keeping our camera hand steady. Fragmented between the experience and our record-keeping devices, we effectively trade our faculty to remember by living to create intangible reminders of the past.
Inceasing video and photography are but two symptoms of this detrimental tradeoff. The rise of Internet search engines such as Google have also changed the way our brain remembers information, according to research by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow.
“Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things,” Sparrow said. “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”
And today, that information is mostly found in yesterday’s photographs and videos.
The problem of literally losing our wits is deservedly frightful to those who value their capacity to think and remember independent of external and material reminders. But rather than finding methods to produce fewer, more deliberate photos or videos, some proponents of the photographic solution insist on increasing the grand sum of captured content to reduce the anxiety of missing magical moments.
Swedish-startup Memento recently raised more than $550,000 to begin production of its “Narrative Clip,” a miniature camera that attaches to the front of its owners and takes photos of whatever is in front of it every 30 seconds. Marketed as a “way to relive more of our lives in the future,” Memento’s Narrative Clip represents everything that is wrong with our disposition to fight personal problems with materialistic products.
I agree with Memento that sometimes “life just rushes by, too fast for us to grasp,” but I disagree that automatically capturing photos at customizable frequency is going to help me get my affairs in order to better appreciate the important details of my life.
What can help, however, is stopping to smell the proverbial roses. Appreciating the present starts with living in the present, a task undoubtedly more easily said than done. But recognizing the necessity to live unencumbered by the urgency to record is a first step to appreciating the beauty that is lost during our reckless documentations of the mundane.
I once asked a European travel partner if he planned on taking pictures while visiting the site of a former concentration camp. He hesitated before shaking his head responding, “No, I think I want to be in the moment when I go there.”
There are some things that deserve to be experienced in their entirety else we lose the importance of their weight amidst our panicked panorama productions.
Send your thoughts to Neel at technician-viewpoint@ncsu.edu.
