[1]I was mulling around the Lincoln Park Zoo [2] today with a friend when a man stepped on me. He was filming a Siberian tiger with a high-end digital video camera, which he held on an expensive mounting. He was fidgeting with all of the camera’s features, backing up to get the perfect shot, and he stepped all over my feet. The foot-stomping didn’t bother me so much as the man’s intent focus on something other than his present surroundings. A beautiful creature stood before him, but his attention was directed at the camera and the filming of the tiger more than it was the tiger itself.
Not much later, something similar occurred in the Tropical Birds House. As I was watching the bleeding-heart pigeons, a man, family in tow, came around the corner with a massive video camera. He also had it placed on an expensive mount. Obliviously, he nudged forward until his lens nearly leaned on the display’s glass. He fiddled and fidgeted. He zoomed on the critters for a moment, and left.
“Do you think he’ll ever watch that footage?” my friend asked.
“No,” I guessed. Without much thought I noted, “It isn’t about the footage. He probably just bought that camera, and is filming because he wants to play with it.”
“So the actual footage is useless,” he observed in return.
I intuited that the man’s camera was a new purchase because I’ve done the exact same thing with a fresh ‘toy’. Last winter I bought a cheap, adequate consumer-grade digital camera. I immediately took it on a photo-taking jaunt to the Columbus Botanic Gardens [3]. I took close-up macros shots of water droplets on petals, long panoramas of trees enveloped in mist, and every other cliched stock-photo trope you can imagine. Lost in my little photographer game, I probably invaded the space of other visitors.
I have never used or shared those photos for anything. In fact, I rarely use the camera.
Sometimes, the recording of experience supersede experience itself. Anyone who has gone to a concert recently can relate to this. If a concert has a strong showing of young adults and adolescents, there is a 100% chance that several people are recording the show with a camera or phone. Probably a few people are holding their phones to the air, a friend on the line, straining and blocking views so the pal might ‘hear’ the performance. At least a thousand people there are texting about the experience.
When my teenage sister gets into a fight, one of the first things she does is commemorate the event with a surly Facebook status update. When I think of a smart quip or musing, I tell myself, “Oooh I better remember to put that stuff on Twitter.” And yes, when some interesting interpersonal conflict rolls my way, I whip out my phone and send someone a text that reads, “I have gossip! Want to meet later?”
“Pics or it didn’t happen!” Is a common online protest, prominent in communities like 4chan [4]. Infantile as it sounds, it might reflect the welcome emergence of online skepticism. Unfortunately these protestations urge us to snap, record, tweet and text our experiences all the more. With human memory so faulty, how can we even be sure our own lives happened if we don’t have a litany of pics?
I’m not sure if it is for good or ill that we feel compelled to document all experiences. But at least future historians will have a hell of an in-depth record to probe. Maybe then my tweets and botanic garden photos will finally seem interesting.
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