Last night I went with some friends to see the magnificent fireworks over the Hudson River in New York City in celebration of Independence Day. There was a huge crowd of people, every one of whom had walked over to the extreme West Side of Manhattan. As the time of the free show approached, the crowd gradually grew in number until it formed a cheerful packed throng looking out over the river, joyful in expectation.
When the fireworks at last began, they were magnificent, spectacular, at some points merely beautiful and at other moments truly transcendent. The effects ran the gamut from a haunting ghostly weeping willow in the sky to a trick rocket that exploded into a huge, perfectly formed smiley face, like a Hallmark card from God.
The one odd note — to me at least — came with the realization that once the fireworks began I found myself surrounded by thousands upon thousands of upraised smart phones, all pointed at the sky, their owners staring intently into little screens that glowed in the dark like so many strangely rectangular fireflies.
Here we were, at an event whose sole purpose was to be immense, overwhelming, a physical expression of celebration in the open air, framed majestically by the vast overhead dome of night sky, and these people were all missing it. Instead of looking at the show itself, each of these people’s eyes were glued to a tiny screen, perhaps two by three inches, with a little washed out low resolution version of the awesome experience that was happening — really happening — all about them.
What was going on here? I found myself trying to figure this out. Perhaps each of these people loved some special person in another part of the world with such a depth of passion that they were willing to forego the wondrous experience of their own senses — this magnificent display of pyrotechnical wonder arrayed before them — just to send a crappy low res video of the event to their far away loved one.
But somehow I doubt that’s what was going on.
Or perhaps they were all acting out of a sense of personal civic responsibility. Perhaps, they thought, if they didn’t capture this moment, with their own tiny little cell phone cameras, then the memory of these fireworks would be lost to the world forever, and future generations would be denied knowledge of all that had transpired this night.
But somehow I doubt that one too.
So what the hell was going on here? What were all these people thinking? Have we really gotten to the point where people have become so dependent on their tiny cell phone screens that they can’t even see something as immediate and breathtaking as fireworks without them? Have we really lost all sense of wonder?
Decades ago in NYC you would see a group of people all photographing the same thing and you’d know: these were Japanese tourists. Now we have become Japanese in this aspect. Armed with new devices, we want to know how well they will work in capturing our memories. Except that not all of us are photographing/recording. I used to be among those recording. I stopped when I saw the number of people recording. It was only something I became aware of as the number approached –half the group–. We don’t all need to be recording this.
Our memories become something that we compare to what displays in playback and at first viewing measures what was lost. Eventually memories of the event are replaces by recollections of recording the event and not the event, with its subtleties, at all.
I saw fireworks in a much smaller setting and the only person within my view recording the event was wearing a strobing headband, trying to draw attention from the sky to themselves.
This makes me sad…
As people communicate more and more through their gadgets, they, also look to their gadgets as windows into their “real” world. Recording every banal detail of daily life and sharing it with friends on a two-inch screen…
I sometimes find myself sucked into the same fakeness… the pseudo-relationships, pseudo-communication, and lack of normal interpersonal relationships, or as in your examples, relationship with the world around us.
We find ourselves looking at depictions of reality on tiny boxes, or, using comments on blogs to communicate with friends…
Not to be defensive just because I’m Japanese 🙂
But just because my parents use Skype video phone to see my kids half a world away doesn’t mean that they love us less or more. Also especially political events recorded by photos/videos do change the world by being sent elsewhere.
Fireworks, I would rather stare at the sky.
Yes, Mari, I agree. To me the issue is not the use of any particular technology per se — to be human is use technology, whether fire or the wheel or written language. What bothers me is rather the reflexive habit of using some technology even when it reduces, rather than adds to, one’s quality of life.
The utility of any technology is highly contextual, whether that technology is a car or television or pencil and paper. The trick is to figure out when to walk and when to drive, when Skype is bringing us closer and when it’s just getting in the way — and when to put away the damned smart phone and watch the fireworks.
Well put Ken.