Unplugging: Are We Living Life, or Just Recording It?

Taking a trip is the best way to wipe the slate clean, break stale habits and get a fresh start. Right now one cluster of habits I’ve been struggling to manage can be grouped under the category of screen time. The time devoted to staring into the screen tends to swell gradually, until I realize that I have slipped into spending a shocking amount of time staring into my phone.

Now that we all have cameras in our smart phones, and photos and videos are free, it seems that people are filming and photographing more and more of their activities. Many people seem to believe that if we haven’t photographed or videoed an occurrence, it didn’t happen, or it wasn’t significant. What’s the point of anything if you didn’t get a record of it and post it on social media? Is that really true? Do we have to video something in order for it to count? I don’t think so.

How much value do we give to just experiencing something directly, in real time, without any intervening medium? Staring at the Taj Mahal, really looking at it, looking into it, branding the memory into the brain – is that obsolete now?

Or is the objective to grab a few shots of it, to document the experience, post it on social media, and then move on? Ironically, it’s possible to get the photograph without really savoring the experience. I can get so absorbed in taking pictures and videos that I am actually not looking at the real things I am photographing. Not really looking. Sometimes it’s an effort to pull myself back to the present reality.

One of the great things about travel has always been that when you see things in their actual presence you realize how much you miss by just looking at photographs. As great as a photo may be, no photograph can live up to the great sights in person, Victoria Falls, the Grand Canyon, Machu Picchu, etc. ad infinitum. If you have seen any of these things, or this order of monumental sights, you know that no photograph or movie can ever capture it. That’s part of what’s so extraordinary about the experience, why people still travel, even though you can go online and look at pictures of anything. You can produce stunning, breathtaking pictures. But nothing is like the real thing.

If you extend this tendency of filming everything, you could theoretically reach the point where you take a trip and never see anything directly, but only through the same viewfinder image your friends will see when you go home. But isn’t it sad to go somewhere and not really look at it, only capture photographs to be looked at later?

Cameras can take wonderful pictures and movies that make marvelous souvenirs and can remind you after the trip of what you saw, that is, if you did actually see it. Of course they’re great. Phone cameras are powerful instruments, capable of producing fantastic photographs and movies. That’s why we’re all so absorbed in them. But if you spent no time looking at the actual scene without your camera intervening, maybe you didn’t see it at all. That seems sad, and unnecessary.

It’s easy to slip unconsciously into habits that are hard to break. I have to grab my phone for so many things, and once I have picked it up, it’s become habitual to make the rounds of the apps, the social media sites, all the many things I use the phone for. Time slips away with me sucked into my phone, effectively not present in my physical body. That’s okay, sometimes. But maybe a little too much for me lately.

I remember hearing stories about how primitive people didn’t want their pictures taken because they feared that the camera would rob them of their souls. I chuckled at the time about their naïveté, that they could believe such a notion. Lately, I’m reconsidering it. The phone seems to have the power to suck your soul right into it, and leave your body like an inert thing.

Part of the problem is that the camera is only one of the things you use your phone for. It’s not just a camera, it’s a computer. Once you pick it up, you’re likely to get pulled into all sorts of things. I look at it for the weather, my bank balance, my emails, Facebook, Instagram, searching for a definition or a fact on Google, playing music, the time, dates on my calendar, photos, Uber, the news, the list could go on and on. Once you cross that threshold into the virtual world, there are so many things to hold you there. Sometimes it gets to be too much, too much time staring into the phone. At this point I am looking for a little less intimacy with that little device.

I get a shocking realization of how dependent I am on my phone any time I reach for it and can’t find it for a few seconds. If I think I have lost it, my mind reels, racing furiously through the countless problems that I’ll have to deal with if I don’t find it.

Without your phone, you can’t do anything, it seems. You can’t call anyone. You can’t use the GPS to find your way. What’s the weather? What’s the news? Did you get an answer to that important email? All the millions of things you use your phone for, you can’t do until you replace it. Losing your phone is crippling, like losing some of your brain, a vital organ.

I’m still amazed to see how many people at any given time or place are absorbed in their phones and effectively not present in the physical environment. I even see young couples on dinner dates sitting silently, not engaging with each other, both abstractedly staring into their phones. When your mind slips through that screen into cyberspace, you leave your body uninhabited.

This is our world now. We will go into the future with this uneasy alliance with various kinds of computer intelligence, and it will be up to us as individuals to strike our own balances, and answer for ourselves how much time we want to spend in the virtual world versus the actual world.

It’s sad when a trip is over, to find that though I may have gotten some good shots, most of the time I spent looking into the camera didn’t produce anything worth showing anyone anyway.

It seems that at some point it would have to come full circle. If you are videoing everything that happens to you, when are you possibly going to watch it? And if you watch it, will you video yourself watching it? Who can possibly watch all this stuff? We’re too busy videoing what is happening now. I think I have come full circle. I am trying to establish a better balance, with more time in the real world, and less in my phone. But it tends to creep back.

Nothing like a good trip to get things moving, to blast out the cobwebs and remember what it’s like to be fully engaged in your actual surroundings, in what you are doing. A trip can jar you out of your hypnotic state and show you something so spectacular that it commands your attention. Having your daily routines disrupted while you experience a series of fabulous impressions in the actual world is a great way to re-engage with the real world.

Having some photos and video clips can help preserve travel memories, for sure. But too much filming can ruin those memories. To remember something you need to be paying attention in the first place.

I’m looking for a little more space from the phone. I want to pay more attention to my surroundings, which are actually much more vivid and exciting than what’s on that little screen. Out-of-body experiences have their place, but these days I prefer the experiences I can have in the physical world.

Your humble reporter,

Colin Treadwell.