For as long as we've been attending the kids' school concerts, I've been wondering about the people recording school concerts. "Who," I would think to myself, "is going to watch that? Isn't it bad enough the first time through?" Clearly I'm in the minority. At the last junior high concert I attended, it seemed like every single family had at least one member charged with getting video of the proceedings. And I'm sure you saw the picture of St. Peter's Square in 2013 vs. 2005.
The first part of my question is this: why the emphasis on creating visual mementos? Do families really go back and watch the performances again? Is there something more special about having one's own photo or video of a famous event like the papal election? Are there lots of grandparents who enjoy cellphone videos of concerts that are kind of painful the first time around? Even when the events are non-painful, I still find it puzzling. Part of the magic of live performance is its evanescence -- the short-lived connection between an actor or musician and his audience.
The second part of my question is this: does recording an experience alter the experience itself? If a person is shooting video, does the focus on framing the shot and panning smoothly leave a person with less capacity to pay attention to the present moment? I know it can change the experience for some audience members -- last weekend my son ran the lights for the high school musical, where a mom was recording each of her son's numbers on her iPhone. This is a recent phenomenon, seeing a performer on stage at the same time that you see the performer on the iPhone screen at the front of the house, a little oblong of light amid the darkened rows of seats.
Because I've been writing recently about being judgy, I should probably spell it out: there's no judginess lurking behind these questions. As long as people aren't blocking anyone's view, or making recordings after being asked not to make recordings, I don't have any objections. It's just foreign to me.
Somewhere there's a C.S. Lewis quote about two men watching the sun go down. One of the men is engrossed in the experience itself, while the other is inwardly watching himself watch the sunset. (Anybody know where that comes from? I can't find it.) I often watch myself watching -- planning a blog post about the sunset, thinking of a pithy Facebook status update about the sunset. "Stop that," I tell myself sometimes. "Be right here." Sometimes it works, for a little while.
For a long time, I think, the effects of self-watching were mostly confined to the self. With the spread of social media, it's a different story. There's a constant temptation to create a curated online life. I keep asking myself, "Am I being real, or am I buffing the image I'd like to project?" My pal Jenny talks about trying to teach her daughters that it's silly to envy a Facebook profile, which may be widely divorced from an actual messy life. It doesn't seem to be working, she reports.
One of the Mason-Dixon Knitting bloggers described a game she played with herself, trying to remember the unrecorded events of babyhood. It's a hard game for me too. I go back to my archives all the time and unearth fun stories I had completely forgotten. If I don't write it down, if I don't take a picture, will the memory fade? If we don't record the junior high band's rendition of Frosty the Snowman, will it be as if it never happened?
(That last is a chance I'm willing to take.)
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