I was reading somewhere that evolutionarily-speaking, we, as a species, are failing to maintain high standards when it comes to standing straight and upright and are now on a downward trend, slouching our way back to the primeval pond. We are, for the most part, desk-bound and immobile, with a sitting posture that slumps forward and downwards. The laptop is much to blame as is, of course, the mobile phone.
But we love our phones. Let me put my hand up straight away – once it’s not preoccupied by scrolling duties – that I certainly do. I really, really do. However, there are limits to the useful, life-enhancing, knowledge-gleaning functions our phones so wonderfully provide. The function in question, which fails on all accounts listed above, is its capacity to record events, public events, for posterity.
Only recently, I was sitting behind someone, keen to document a choir’s rendition of some popular songs. This person held their phone up and out and in doing so entirely blocked my view of the singers. I began seething on the spot. I fantasised about slapping that phone out of their hand; about swishing it up into the gallery above which I estimated, as I cast my eyes upwards, I had a good chance of making; about taking them aside and inquiring who this recording was for and how much enjoyment these people would extract from this amateur video and why, oh why, they didn’t just want to look and listen, right there and then. For themselves. Just themselves.
Not so long ago, a friend sent around a recording taken at a live gig. I looked at this message in my WhatsApp group and lacked the will to click on the play icon. If I wanted to hear that song, I could go on to YouTube. I could ask a passing 10 year old to access it in other digitally-savvy ways. I had little or no interest in watching this blurry recording. It was nice that my friend was thinking of us all but really, we didn’t deserve or appreciate this attention. He had my full permission to enjoy the moment guilt-free, for his own uninterrupted pleasure.
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But why is it that we feel compelled to put a piece of technology between ourselves and reality? Are we losing the ability to remember? The ability to retell or describe? Or have we reached the point of that tree falling in the forest – if nobody hears it, does it make a sound? If something is not captured on a device, has it actually happened?
Our obsession with physical representations of past events is not new, of course. Photographs have been around for centuries now. But they have the capacity to ambush, simply by existing, silently and unobtrusively.
A group of us from work went to the Tenement Museum in Dublin in the past few weeks and found ourselves exposed to black and white photographs from the beginning of the 1900s. These grainy shots of run-down buildings and impoverished children on the street staring directly into the camera took our breath away. But, of course, families everywhere have photos of people long since gone, sitting, chatting and going about their business which can bring a lump to the throat.
But ironically, with the advent of the camera-phone, we’re taking more and more photos but looking at them less and less. As often as not, it’s only in the moments immediately after a photo has been taken that any meaningful perusal takes place. These photos rarely make it to a frame on a shelf or table.
The person who held their phone up to record that choir singing those popular songs – and to be fair it was only parts of these songs that they recorded – may well have looked at these videos again and again. They may well have passed them on to friends and family who appreciated their thoughtfulness. Who, for a moment, felt they were really there.
Maybe.
Perhaps.
But chances are they’ve already been forgotten about. Other recordings have superseded them. In all likelihood, they’re squatting somewhere in the all-encompassing cloud, unwatched and unloved.
And as for me, if I find myself in a similar situation, ensconced behind a recorder of a public event, I will simply ask if they wouldn’t mind keeping their phone directly in front of them or to the left or to the right. And while I’m at it, for the sake of my own mindfulness, I will aspire towards keeping those fantasies about propelling that device to the outer reaches of the hall or church to an absolute minimum.
Maybe.
Perhaps.
