June 30, 2007
From cave paintings to camera phones
In an early June Guardian column Nick Carr opines on the newest leisure time activity–the self-recording of one’s daily life. “Today, we seem to be operating under a new and very different dictum: the unrecorded life is not worth living,” Nick writes. ZDNet Blog reports.
He traces the phenomenon from painting on cave walls to cheap camcorders and now camera phones.
... What exactly is behind our rage to document the minutiae of our daily existence? That’s hard to say. Maybe it’s just another manifestation of modern-day narcissism. Maybe it’s a byproduct of our media-saturated culture, with its sense that nothing’s real until it’s been recorded and broadcast. Or maybe it goes deeper than that. In striving to preserve the moments of our lives, to immortalise them, might we simply be expressing our fear of death?
... Cave paintings drawn more than 30,000 years ago rarely had human forms, and are composed of mostly wild animals, perhaps depicting hunting and gathering scenes. Today we shop in supermarkets for food, and spend more of our time focused on ourselves as subject and object. As Nick concludes in his column, “We’re so busy recording our lives that we have little time left to examine them. And perhaps that, more than anything else, is the real point.”
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