It’s day 2 of the Bored and Brilliant Challenge! Read my initial reflections on the project, yesterday’s reflections, or check out the website and the New Tech City podcast, which sponsors the project.
Here’s day 2:
Your instructions: See the world through your eyes, not your screen. Take absolutely no pictures today. Not of your lunch, not of your children, not of your cubicle mate, not of the beautiful sunset. No picture messages. No cat pics.
Today’s instructions are not a big stretch for me—I think I’m enough of a digital immigrant that I don’t feel the need to record everything with a photo, and I can easily go a day without taking a picture. But I did take note of the neurological research showing that taking a photo negatively impacts your ability to remember the event.
I think a lot about the impact technology has on memory. Evernote is one of my killer apps; I use it for almost everything. I also know that I often reflexively dump stuff there rather than doing the deeper thinking that can help it lodge in my memory. You can argue that in the age of cheap storage, memory has become obsolete. But how can you access something if you don’t even remember what the something is?
What will be the collective effect of all this outsourcing of memory?
Louis CK has a hilarious, on point, and crude bit about people who record their kids’ performances. It is here-and I have warned you about the language, so don’t write me letters. But for something quite different on the same topic, check out the following short video about a museum guard who works at the Guggenheim. He has seen immense change in how people experience the museum since the advent of smartphones:
Great post Mary Ann. And so true. We put distance between ourselves and too many experiences. And Louis CK’s “bit” is supremely hysterical. He really gets it. Some of us who are products of the digital age resonate perfectly with so much of what he — and you — are saying and writing. Thanks.
Thanks for reading Christine!
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Hi MaryAnn - your post reminded me of a poem and sent me a’searching. Not a bad way to start the day. Do you know this one, by the inimitable Wendell Berry?:
The Vacation
Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation. He showed
his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,
preserving it forever: the river, the trees,
the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat
behind which he stood with his camera
preserving his vacation even as he was having it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. It would be there. With a flick
of a switch, there it would be. But he
would not be in it. He would never be in it.
Even in the days before phones that do everything, when I was traveling through Europe after graduating college, one of the best things that happened was dropping my camera, because it forced me to start journaling my thoughts,feelings and impressions rather than just take static photos.