Over the years I’ve come to hold the belief that the time and energy spent attempting to document any cool and interesting thing is in direct competition with actually experiencing it.
Despite now being 16 years old, Instagram has not relinquished its stranglehold on society. The impulse to create a record is ingrained. I don’t post very much on Instagram, but I still take photos constantly. There’s usually a little voice in my head saying this would make a good photo. For people who post more often, I imagine that voice would be considerably louder. But documenting a moment is not free – it takes time (how much? How long is a piece of string?), energy, and the headspace of being on the lookout for a moment worth capturing.
I am a sucker for a live event, live music especially. I’ve been a frequent gig-goer for more than 20 years, starting with a Sum 41 show when I was 13. From tiny local bands in pub backrooms to huge stadium gigs, I’ve been at them all. When you spend that long doing something, you start to notice how it changes. At gigs, one of the most notable changes has been the ubiquity of smartphones.
Almost everyone has a smartphone – I’m not saying I don’t have one when I’m at a gig, or that I never take photos. But as someone who usually sticks to the back of the audience, I’ve watched the plague of glowing rectangles spreading. At a recent My Chemical Romance gig, I could see people spending time during iconic songs fiddling with their camera settings, staring at the giant stage through the bright, glowing screen of their phones. The front rows of a Bowling For Soup gig were full of people standing still to record rather than putting energy into dancing.
I asked a handful of friends, and most of them have rarely or never looked back on the trove of videos and photos they’d taken at gigs and other performances, which makes me wonder – what is it all even for? If the act of documenting is so automatic and unexamined, why take ourselves out of the experience to do it?
Maybe we’re not even taking the photos for our own benefit: perhaps we’re snapping in case they fit the curated aesthetic we’re cultivating online. We document things because we’re afraid of losing them, but perhaps we’re sacrificing some of the experience in our attempt to make sure we remember it. Perhaps there’s a difference between documenting something so we can remember it, and documenting it so we can prove it happened.
Featured image credit: Ali Rees