Taking a trip is the best way to wipe the slate clean, break stale habits and get a fresh start. Right now one cluster of habits I’ve been struggling to manage can be grouped under the category of screen time. The time devoted to staring into the screen tends to swell gradually, until I realize that I have slipped into spending a shocking amount of time staring into my phone.
Now that we all have cameras in our smart phones, and photos and videos are free, it seems that people are filming and photographing more and more of their activities. Many people seem to believe that if we haven’t photographed or videoed an occurrence, it didn’t happen, or it wasn’t significant. What’s the point of anything if you didn’t get a record of it and post it on social media? Is that really true? Do we have to video something in order for it to count? I don’t think so.
How much value do we give to just experiencing something directly, in real time, without any intervening medium? Staring at the Taj Mahal, really looking at it, looking into it, branding the memory into the brain – is that obsolete now?
Or is the objective to grab a few shots of it, to document the experience, post it on social media, and then move on? Ironically, it’s possible to get the photograph without really savoring the experience. I can get so absorbed in taking pictures and videos that I am actually not looking at the real things I am photographing. Not really looking. Sometimes it’s an effort to pull myself back to the present reality.
One of the great things about travel has always been that when you see things in their actual presence you realize how much you miss by just looking at photographs. As great as a photo may be, no photograph can live up to the great sights in person, Victoria Falls, the Grand Canyon, Machu Picchu, etc. ad infinitum. If you have seen any of these things, or this order of monumental sights, you know that no photograph or movie can ever capture it. That’s part of what’s so extraordinary about the experience, why people still travel, even though you can go online and look at pictures of anything. You can produce stunning, breathtaking pictures. But nothing is like the real thing.
If you extend this tendency of filming everything, you could theoretically reach the point where you take a trip and never see anything directly, but only through the same viewfinder image your friends will see when you go home. But…
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