Perhaps the quintessential image of a generation lost in technology is a crowd of concert-goers filming the performance on smartphones instead of experiencing the event. Indeed, it is frequently argued that technology distances us from the ever-glorified notion of “living in the moment,” and social media and smartphones are thought to bring us further from the material world in which we live.
This is not an empty theory, and in my own life, I subscribe to the notion that people should put down their phones and experience the world around them. I would not film a concert, nor would I Instagram my latest meal. But to condemn this behavior ignores the fact that it serves great human desires that go far beyond the accumulation of likes or retweets and acts as a small but meaningful attempt to transcend the transitory nature of human existence.
Humans are rational beings, and it stands to reason that the apparently absurd decision to film a concert can be explained. Perhaps it is better to start with a broader question: Why do we film at all?
The most easily identifiable aim of film and photography is to capture experiences that we might otherwise forget, to eternalize minutes and moments that matter. In this light, the desire to film or photograph any event makes a fair bit more sense.
Perhaps this desire is based on something deeper and altogether more important than updating a social media profile. Perhaps it is based instead on the once impossible notion of materializing memory, on the far-from-trivial human desire to retain what we must lose. We may lose the actual experience but not be entirely deprived of its memory; we may lose the man but retain the footprint.
Only a few days ago, I personally fell victim to this great tragedy of lost experience. I was sitting in the final lecture of a favorite class, and there was a definite sadness in hearing the professor mention our “last class.” Sitting there after class had ended, I felt a profound sense of disappointment that I would never hear these lectures again.
My notes — my own inadequate record keeping — will endure, accumulating dust either in my home or a landfill. But the lectures themselves have dissipated before me and will never return. The content I so cherished will slip slowly yet inevitably from my memory until none of it remains. I cling desperately and futilely to the words and phrases that I am doomed to forget.
I could not help but wish that I had filmed or recorded these lectures to have as a memento — if not to watch them, simply to eliminate or reduce the finality of it all. To store them away like old photographs with the knowledge that this period of my life was only nominally over and could be relived if I so desired.
I understand how this generation of technology addicts often appears to others, and I likewise understand criticism of the pointless and childish desire to record every major and trivial occurrence in one’s life. Perhaps it is deserved. But I do believe this culture of documentation is based on something fundamental and — if not redeeming — forgivable. For if we cling too hard to our memories of the past and the videos and photographs that embody them, we do so in noble resistance to finitude and loss.
Transience of experience is life’s greatest tragedy. We often romanticize the loss of memory or past joy as a testament to time as the great equalizer that preserves neither pleasure nor pain. The reality is that the nostalgia for a time when concerts and dinners could not be captured on phones is misplaced.
Such an outlook glorifies — as nostalgia often does — a suffering that was neither enviable nor rewarding. It also ignores the pain of loss that permeates all life. The tragedy of life is that it ends; of love, that it fades; of moments, that they perish.
Perhaps experience is diminished by its recording, and perhaps you cannot go through life without letting go of moments and memories that have come and gone. But we are reflective creatures and, it seems, always at odds with our relationship to history.
The past is not real enough that we can relive it, nor truly dead enough that we can forget it. In such a world, I cannot condemn the man who films a concert thinking that, one day, he may just want to turn back the clock.
Nicholas Esemplare ’18 is a double concentrator in English and economics and can be reached at nicholas_esemplare@brown.edu.
