Living in the Future’s Past
On a daily basis, we choose pre-empted nostalgia over truly experiencing a moment. This is screen blindness.
Next time you go to a public event — a fireworks display, for instance, or a concert — see if you can spot what I believe is the paradox of our times. Nowhere is this paradox more visible than when thousands of people are crushed together in close quarters, all straining to capture one thing.
As I held up my iPhone between two heads to record the finalé of the Singapore day public fireworks display earlier this year I just happened to look to my right. I saw thousands of sets of eyes trained on one thing, but not the thing I expected. Every set of eyes was set on a small sheet of glass; it was a wall of glass separating this mob from the event they were attempting to witness. Clearly I was a part of this mob, contributing to the scene. I do not know why I happened to look up for a second and reflect, but since doing so I’ve been struck at a variety of other events by the same phenomenon.
It’s as though we live in a form of pre-empted nostalgia. We go out of our ways to attend exciting events and to travel the world, and yet when we do we spend the majority of our time trying to capture our experiences so that we’ll never lose them. We assume that these experiences and these moments will be of higher value to us in the future than they are at present, and we are afraid to let them slip away from us before we can immortalise them.
We pre-judge the moment’s value to us, and in doing so we pass up the opportunity for the experience to truly etch itself into us. In recording the fireworks, I’ll miss the intricacies of each explosion, the colours and sounds together — I’ll instead focus on the tiny images on my screen, making sure they’re in focus. When I view my recording after the event, I’ll see it once again as I saw it at the time; that is, through my screen, without the beautiful details that I can only capture with my senses at the time.
If instead of recording it I simply focussed on the fireworks themselves, viewing them directly, I’d later have a greater, more detailed memory of what they were like. Another example is when we visit a new city: we could quite easily spend most of the first day exploring taking photos of everything in excitement; snapping away at each new sight, being once-removed from the scene we are a part of. Sure, we’ll have images of what we saw later, and we can show them to friends and family back home. But I would argue that a more detailed memory of that experience is worth a thousand photos. If we’d instead focussed on absorbing the entire scene, rather than capturing it for later, we will notice things we wouldn’t through our screen.
On a recent trip to Greece I put my theories to the test. I sat at a cafe in the Plaka district of Athens — my seat facing the street, as they seem only to do in Europe — and just watched. I reflected that if I hadn’t made this conscious decision to simply watch, I would’ve lifted my camera with each interesting thing that passed me by. An instant’s sight of something interesting would’ve then had me viewing the scene through the tiny viewfinder; my memories of the scene would forever have been confined to that within the screen.
But by simply watching, I began to put the entire scene together in a way my camera could never capture: a young man hung laundry out on his apartment’s balcony, draping the deep-blue sheets over the railing, while an elderly woman walked below, wearing a thick coat of the same deep-blue. I stopped worrying about trying to capture this so I could always remember it, and just enjoyed the sight itself. And as I write this I’m able to conjure the scene in so much more detail than, say, the Singapore fireworks.
In our desperation to record a moment, the value of the experience is lost; the recorded version instead consumes bytes until we one day need more digital memory to record our next experience, at which point it is deleted and forever forgotten. We pass up the opportunity for the experience itself to etch itself into our subconscious and our memory. We choose the future instead. We choose pre-empted nostalgia.
