Posted on 09/04/2014 4:38:22 AM PDT by Kaslin
Good read. Spot-on as well.
This is why we have memories. But perhaps today’s youth are so drug-addled in the brain that they can no longer have them.
I agree with this! I was at a religious site in Spain recently where there is a well known figure of the Virgin, located above the altar at an important church. People wait on line for quite some time to go up there, say a prayer, and kiss the figure. But this time, I’d say that about 30% of the people who went up the stairs got to the top, turned around, and took their pictures or had a companion take their pictures, and then walked right on by the Virgin without a glance.
I don’t want to sound like a crabapple! I realize that within limits cell phone photos are fun and appropriate. I take photos of things I think my friends or family would like to see at the moment and send them by SMS. I enjoy getting their photos. But a quick photo of something interesting, shared immediately, is a lot different from the endless photographing or recording of every instant of one’s life, to the point that the actual event is missed or ignored.
Back in 92, I completed a Standing Naval Forces Atlantic cruise. The only camera I had was a Canon sure shot.
Me and a few other guys were essentially tourists. See the sights and take tours. I kept as much film as I could and used it.
Anyway, some gave me grief about taking so many photos during the deployment. Near the end, more than a few wanted to buy snapshots since they were constantly drunk on every port visit.
I have a complaint. It’s hard to chat up women nowadays. It use to be you could sit by a woman at a park or some other place and start chatting. Now, the phone is glued to their heads and they’re mumbling on and on about this and that.
Time marches on.
I think some people, no matter where they are at, are hoping to catch the moment something goes terribly wrong...
Totally agree.
And it’s not just young people. I took my wife to see Michael Bublé for our anniversary. I was surprised to see so many senior adults filming the concert with their phones.
On another note, I distinctly remember walking from grandfather’s hardware store to buy “Frampton Comes Alive” and “Fly Like an Eagle” (Steve Miller Band) from the Ben Franklin five and dime.
For me, I’d prefer to live the moment instead of making a video, but the author just takes it too far. He got a few of the current buzzwords in, but postmodern wasnt used so he still has work to do.
Frampton is clearly a butthead. Didn’t care for his music back in the day, can’t imagine plopping down good money to see him today.
Life is just what happens to you while your busy making other plans. — John Lennon
In the above, your = you’re. Duh.
I will take my 60D and kit with me a lot. Mostly to get stuff for stock video and a photo sometimes. Seeing everyone going crazy with smartphones all the time annoys me to no end. Not every second has to be captured.
I don’t exactly know how to say it but people now don’t LIVE in the way that people did fifty years ago. Children don’t have the same insatiable curiosity and I am hearing small rumblings indicating that some young people are already tired of the constant barrage of technology. I know I am tired of it, I find myself daydreaming of a place with no TV, no computers, no cellphones, in fact not even any electricity.
My wife and I can access more television “channels” than existed in the entire world when I first saw a television but there is very little that I find interesting any longer.
I actually began noticing a long time ago that some people were so obsessed with taking still pictures and videos of events that they missed the actual event. Everyone acting as if they had been hired to film a wedding or something. I practically stopped taking any kind of pictures long ago when I realized how many hundreds of slides and prints I had accumulated, some of them very good if I do say so myself, that were just occupying space in a closet with no one ever looking at them. People take so many pictures now that they defeat the whole purpose of taking pictures, if you have one good picture of something it might be worth looking at but if you have a thousand second rate pictures no one is interested. What is the point of a lot of pictures that people look at a week after the event and then never look at them again?
You think women who do that would have anything to say that's worth hearing?
So True.
Once (circa 1974-75) saw Peter Frampton perform at a high school gym in Connecticut prior to release of ‘Frampton Comes Alive’. Our family home had only one rotary phone in those days...ha! Got no iPhotos, but can still clearly recall Frampton on stage using his talk box...awesome concert with high school friends...great memories!
That's true in my world too. I work with two sorts of birders: those who must stop, get out the camera, and clumsily capture every bird on film... And those who simply enjoy capturing the moment of spending a short time with a beautiful, wild bird, and observing it.
I will never understand the camera people. It defeats the purpose of seeking the wilderness experience in the first place.
I can’t agree with you that it’s drugs wrecking their memories, but the continuous attack on the attention span that’s been going on, by my reckoning, with MTV.
For example, count — if you can — the “cuts” in a TV commercial. The 15-second commercials (because 30 seconds is too long these days) might have ten or more, and it’s the very rare 30-second commercial that has less than twenty.
Some commercials, UFC pay-per-view fights come to mind, are literally uncountable without rewatching via the DVR at half speed. I’ve counted over 50 “cuts” in some 30-second commercials. That’s not even something you are supposed to watch; that’s something that’s just supposed to make you think, “wow, something cool is happening here, I think.”
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