With cameras in phones, cheap video cameras, blogs, and anything else you can record your life with, we’re documenting our lives like no society ever has. Our days can be reported on, taped, podcasted, blogged, video blogged, micro blogged, photographed, commented on… all supposedly allowing us to live forever in the vast nexus of digital storage. (Though I hear Livejournal deletes your blog after a year of not logging in – so they can clear space for the living.)

But are we somehow taking away the specialness of life with all of this documentation? Does it cheapen our experiences to be able to dial up the video of them at a whim, relying on the value of our own memories?

Or

Do you think this is preferable, since you always have some touchstone to events that happened in your life? Rather than you mother’s scrapbook, full of photos taken on “special occasions,” do you like being able to call up a thought on a day you blogged back in 2003?

Well, I am not a blogger and nor do I wish to be, but it does seem that people are documenting their lives constantly, and I am okay with that, because I don’t have to read it if I don’t want to. If I ever did blog I would probably do it for myself as opposed to doing it so people will read it, more of a diary type thing, but as I said I don’t ever plan on doing that.

However, with two children I do photograph and video more than I would have ever thought possible thanks to my cell phone camera, my digital camera and my Flip. My mother used to drive me nuts by always wanting to take pictures when I was growing, and now I have turned into that person, but I have the advantage of being able to see those pictures or videos instantly to know if I want to keep or delete and I can send almost instantly to anyone I want. My mother may have developed those pictures once a year. I can have those pictures printed (virtually) and sent off in seconds.

People used to fear big brother was watching. Forget big brother, our entire society is eagerly waiting to capture any moment at the drop of a hat. And for some reason I am okay with that. One day we will be looking at this generation in great detail thanks to all of the blogs, images and video at our disposal and we will most likely say “What the hell were we thinking”

Brian Alig

People generally post on the Internet only what they are willing to share with the public. It is also quite common for people to filter their words and thoughts so only the most interesting and favorable information gets out. One way to think about it is that social media content producers are writing their autobiographies on the fly.

With people who become famous or renowned in their industry, a digital paper trail will serve as an excellent look into the lives of those individuals. For people who are not so lucky, the data will fade into obscurity along with the digital lives of billions of other average people.

As for affecting the specialness of life, I think having the ability to share a video of an event — or even an immediate recollection after an event — is favorable to relying on one’s memory and one’s ability to communicate to another person something that happened years ago. If anything, this will give people a better understanding and greater appreciation of what you had gone through.

Brian Shaler

It’s better by a long shot, but - like everything - it has its caveats. (You knew that was coming, right?)

Special moments are special regardless of whether or not they’re captured on film of any kind, and being so captured does not make them less so. The only “harm” inflicted by recording these moments is on our ability to get away with embellishing them the way feeble human memories typically do.

The memory of a child’s first steps is in no way less “special” because it was captured on film. Michael Phelps becoming the winning-est Olympian of all time is in no way lessened by the fact that it was captured by dozens of cameras in high definition, viewed by millions of people worldwide in real time, and viewable any time thereafter. The “vast nexus of digital storage” makes it possible to preserve these moments in a way that makes them less susceptible to being lost, and their being digital means it is far, far easier to preserve them exactly as they were recorded.

Some people have a love affair with printed paper, photographs, and other tactile means for recording human activity and/or production. I don’t buy that kind of sentimentality. The printed word’s value has nothing to do with it being “printed” - its value is intrinsic. A photograph lost in a fire has no value relative to a high quality scan of it stored in the cloud, where it can be recalled on demand; where companies far better at the task see to it that it is always there, ready.

I mentioned caveats, and in my opinion the problem with the ubiquity of recording devices is that they get us far too comfortable with exposing our private lives. The average person has no idea they’re caught on camera dozens - sometimes hundreds - of times a day. We’ve regressed into a society where privacy is no longer a right, but a privilege, and where precious few understand how to properly respond to any question that begins with, “If you’ve got nothing to hide…”

Joseph Jaramillo

The idea of capturing the moments of your life is and will always be special. But as a society I believe we are going a little overboard with allowing other people to access those moments. Any sense of privacy is being lost and sadly I don’t see that diminishing anytime soon.

Roger Hurni

That’s a good question you raise.

I had a little talk about something similar a couple days ago where it was asked if access to all this information makes us less intelligent? Basically meaning that instead of learning anything you can look it up on Google. While I understand the point I don’t believe so, in ways. Take for instance if you lose your phone. How many phone numbers of friends/family are you going to remember? Probably none as you’ve never really seen them before. But when I was a kid, I knew every friends numbers in my head because I didn’t have a cell phone to save them in.

At the same time I believe it intelligent to be able to know how/where to find anything when needed. That helps me learn.

As for the archiving of your life.
I see the specialness of life in the ability to index all that information and advance our quality of life. People have been indexing information with hieroglyphs and stories and pictures (yearbooks) ever since they could and all this digital media is just the next step in all that. … and yet we still have our memories :)

Technology helps us to live longer, cure diseases, and learn more about anything (not counting budgets or politics).

Chuck Reynolds

I do believe that ages ago people may have recorded their thoughts through diaries and journals more than people do today. They had less technological distractions, and more time to reflect on life. Fast forward to today, technology is making it easy and fun to record and share our lives with multimedia.

I don’t feel that ease of creation and sharing cheapens our imagination or the experiences recorded. I look at photos from my childhood and it helps me remember other things about a particular vacation which was NOT recorded on film, yet having a photo jars my memory about that era and helps “prove” to my brain that I was there and did that thing. Other memories follow. When we go through photos with our children they start talking about other things from the photos.

A problem with extreme documentation of our lives is we may miss out on life right now, while trying to create the “now” memories. Spending 12 hours glued to ustream.tv watching a someone life stream their (also) normal life while ignoring your own friends and family means that you are missing out on your own life. If something that great happens in a life feed, believe me, you can always see the Flickr photos, blog posts or tweets about it the next day.

As a photographer I’ve been guilty of dragging my pro gear to the park to photograph my kids playing. A ten minute lighting setup and a few thousand dollars of photo gear sitting on the ground is not very conducive to me playing with my kids and being a dad. A while back I found a website called, “UnPhotographable” by photographer Michael David Murphy. He describes events which he missed with his camera or which he chose to not photograph while truly appreciating the moment. I was never much into poetry, yet as a photographer I understand capturing a split second in time which tells a powerful story.

Since finding Michael’s blog, I’ve made a conscious efforts to take in some moments and cherish them in my mind. A cell phone photo (or just a memory) of my happy kids will will always trump a very well lit photo of a 5 year old wishing his dad would chase him around the park.

Adam Nollmeyer
Phoenix Photographer

I must say, the main reason I chose this topic for the question this week is that I just sold my Flip Video camera. It was neat for a while, but I realized as I was strolling through Jerome with my girlfriend that I wasn’t really being in the moment - I was sacrificing that moment so that I could point and click. What’s more, looking at the videos the next day, just as Adam described the YouTube example, the videos weren’t worth missing the moment of really “being there.”

How much more of our lives are lost like that? Frankly, I don’t mind killing time that way: I’m waiting for the movie to start, so I fire off a quick text to Brightkite and I’m on with my life.

For things I actually want to remember, though, I find all this documentation replaces my chance at a memory with a digital scrapbook. And that scrapbook is a pale imitation of having lived a life. The more we do this, the more I fear we won’t even care. We’ll be a population of documentarians with nothing worthy of documenting.

Eric Reid

I would answer “No” and “Yes”.

No – For those entering the fray of social media, blogs, etc. Too much is really not enough. You have to find out what types of content is truly sticky.

Yes – After you have been at it for a while, a good blogger/poster/tweeter understands the types of content which her audience really respond too. In other words, they develop a good gauge for what is interesting, compelling and provocative and subsequently a great content filter. Hint: If it doesn’t elicit further conversation, comments, replies or the occasional “thanks for your post”, then try a different approach. Unfortunately, some sources of social media content just tend to continually create the same kinds of content over and over and expect different results. I think there may be a term that defines that kind of behavior…

Chris Sietsema

We have a fascination with green these days - not the color, of course, but the environmental movement. It’s been around for several years, since even before Nixon signed the EPA into law. And it’s a simple idea: Don’t use what you don’t need, don’t waste what’s in low supply, don’t spew environmentally unsafe material into the system.The problem is most “environmentally conscious” people try to get others into this by brow beating them, and you cannot get a large enough circle of people that way.

The idea that you would drive less just because some dude with a beard and Birkenstock sandals yelled at you the way your mother would when you needed to pick up your room is ridiculous. Think of how long similarly smarmy, controlling people have been screeching at society to stop eating fatty foods or smoking. If this was really such an effective tactic, Marlboro and McDonald’s would be smoking craters in an otherwise pastoral landscape.

Recent spikes in gas prices are exactly what are required to go “green,” frankly. People are adjusting their lifestyles and driving habbits NOW because of the spike in fuel prices - not because of the droning of obnoxious people who otherwise have no voice or power in society. Normal people want to be able to afford luxuries like rent and food. For this reason, they are changing their consumption habits.

Telling you how much more of a good person they are than you are may be fun, of course - hey, in the 1930s it even got the trains in Italy to run on time. But it is hardly an engine for environmental change.

Environmentalists need to change the way they speak their message. I would hate to see a wave of anti-environmentalists come into being, not because they actually hate the Earth, but because they are sick of having to listen to people who ride a bicycle everywhere anyway talk about the virtues of “green.”

Stop trying to shame people into being environmentally conscious - show them how it’s good for their bank account instead.

Postscript

Our Twitter friend @aragonesque sent back this article from the Phoenix New Times - and  makes the same point.

Someone at the Arizona Republic didn’t read their own story. While their special report was on sustainability and the change in attitude towards conservation, they wasted a vast amount of page space on the front page of the article.

Are we nitpicking? The answer is no. All of that paper is not being used - so the rest of the article has to be printed on more paper.

In an article about being green, the Arizona Republic actually wasted paper!

George Carlin died yesterday of a heart attack. He was 71.

This isn’t another boring, maudlin tribute to the greatest comic of the nation - anyone who was a fan knows he would have hated all of this carrying on. But he does deserve to be honored for what he did for the American culture: George Carlin was responsible for helping us to not lie to ourselves.

“The 7 Dirty Words” material that made him famous, looking back, seems at best a little petulant. At the time, of course, it demanded we recognize that these are the words people really say. The rest of his ouvre was dedicated to the same thinking: Let’s not pretend life is some way other than what it is.

As a result of that movement in thinking, we don’t necessarily swear every five minutes, but we are more aware of the “truthiness” of something, as well as when someone is trying to pitch us on something. He made the job of public relations and marketing more difficult, because the same old method of spinning just wouldn’t’ work. At the same time, though, people started to hunger for real answers, for truth from public figures and companies - and in the end, everyone just got more comfortable telling the truth. (Which ironically made our jobs in marketing and PR easier, if the people and products in question were actually admirable.) I’m not saying this was all the work of Carlin, but surely he’s the greatest representative of this C-change in American culture.

It is what I, as a fan of his since I was in grade school, will miss the most about not seeing a new George Carlin HBO special every two or three years: Having him point out the latest funny-yet-tragic way we have all decided to spin our reality. So as a true fan of his, I will say that I will miss his insight, but I will not say, “I’ll miss you, George.”

Because he can’t hear me - he’s dead and in a box.

The environment, sleep disorders, terrorism, leaps in gas prices, disappearing bees… have you ever noticed how easy it is to teach someone about something once you’ve scared the crap out of them first?

Every night, we are informed of some new disease that is lurking out there to steal our sleep, hair, erections, ability to breathe. Then we’re shown a “miracle drug” that will fix us and make the world right again. (Though in some cases use of this drug has resulted in diarrhea, uncontrollable defecation, bleeding from the eyes, American Idol voting…)

Is manufacturing something to be afraid of a smart marketing tactic?

What happens if generating fear becomes de rigueur? Won’t that make it difficult to warn people of something that really is threatening them?

Or does it not matter what happens to society, as long as we can generate some sales right now?

The use of fear has ever steadily been the driving motivator behind television news for the past 10-15 years. The local news used to inform people about the happenings of their community and the goings on in the world around us. But now, local news promos on television and radio have made it so that if you do not watch tonight’s telecast, you will die from some, until now, unknown killer living in your neighborhood/kitchen/water/public place/etc.

It is unbelievable how many of those news teasers and promos say something along the lines of … “Have you ever gone outside? It could be causing your brain to melt. If you don’t want your brain to melt, you need to know what channel X is going to show you … tonight at 10.”

Great, now I cant go outside until the 10 o’clock news, so I know why my brain is melting. I blame the local news for pretty much all ills. These are our gatekeepers people

- Brian Alig

Is manufacturing something to be afraid of a smart marketing tactic?

I think some may find it to be smart, but it’s certainly not ethical if there is no real cause for concern. As a long term strategy, I don’t think it works very well unless there is some validity to the trepidation and the solution proposed actually works.

What happens if generating fear becomes de rigueur? Won’t that make it difficult to warn people of something that really is threatening them?

I think you can see the “boy who cried wolf” effect with the evening news today. 90% of what they report on is either heartbreaking or horrifying. At some point, some of us just either stop watching listening or just become desensitized to the reports. “Gas prices to hit record lows this summer? Another hit and run accident? A brand new meth house discovered 3 miles from where you live? Hmm… sounds par for the course. Oh well.”

If the majority of marketers begin to use fear tactics, their effect will become minimal in good time.

Or does it not matter what happens to society, as long as we can generate some sales right now?

1. Hell no. Of course it matters. Our priorities as marketers should be: Carefully choose the right people and organizations to work with,
2. Aim to solve legitimate problems or meet needs that improve the lives of others and truly believe in what we are selling,
3. Work smart to accomplish the goal(s), and
4. Manage to turn a profit. If the first three items are taken care of, the fourth usually comes naturally.

- Chris Sietsema

My parents tell stories of growing up climbing trees, digging in the dirt, and sharing a soda with a friend with no fear of what the possible dangers could be. I can remember growing up being able to go to the neighborhood park and swimming pool without my parents shadowing me every step of the way with a bottle of SPF in one hand and a cell phone ready to dial emergency services in the other.

Flash forward a few years and the overwhelming fear of germs, disease, and some kind of vague “terrible accident” has, in my opinion, stolen kids’ opportunities to enjoy the kind of innocent childhood we remember. There are bottles of anti-bacterial gel to kill the vile germs that lurk in wait to strike us down with some unmentionable disease on every surface, there are fences around the trees, and portable single portion size packages of medicine in case Jimmy gets a little sniffle at the playground.

In our effort to “protect” ourselves and our children from all the scary things in the world are we forgetting just to live, to enjoy every moment without the constant worry and fear of what “could” happen? Those same dangers have existed for nearly every generation
before ours-they didn’t worry about or in some cases even know about the terrible things we fear so much today and yet they survived just the same. As a matter of fact, the number of people suffering from stress and heart-related medical problems has drastically increased in the last few years. Shouldn’t it be about the quality of your life-how are you contributing positively to that when you’re so preoccupied with what the next “epidemic” or tragedy will be? I don’t carry antibiotic gel or individual serving size packages of medicine in my purse. My kids climb trees, dig in the dirt, and have been known to swallow some less-than-appetizing things on more than one occasion. They get bumps on their heads and scrapes on their knees, and I couldn’t be happier for them. I see other parents who are so afraid now of what the world will do to their precious children, they’re hardly allowed outside the house and a bump on the head warrants a trip to the emergency room for fear of a concussion. What kinds of adults will those children be when they’re taught to fear anything that’s not safety-proofed or sterilized?

Live a little! Get dirty! And I challenge you-get rid of the sanitizers and anti-bacterial nonsense. You’ve lived without them before, and I’m fairly certain you’ll be able to do so again without any fatal consequences.

- Vanessa Geary

I do believe the media instills a lot of fear in people for ratings, and make a mountain out a molehill A LOT. Whenever I see a “Tonight at Ten…” I listen to hear what it will about, and some “scares” are legitimate, like scammers and such. But telling me the “Top ten reasons to fear Safeway..” does make me scared to go into the grocery store. I base it on my previous experiences, and I’ve never had an issue with Safeway.

If there is a legitimate issue, then scaring people should get them to act, like the environment and global warming. In recent years, people have been more aware of their surroundings and even doing little things like recycling more.  But, there is too much scare going on in the news and “special reports” that messages are getting diluted and people aren’t paying as much attention to them. Can’t the news just say, “we have nothing to scare you with, but you may want to know more about this issue?” instead of “What you need to know  about your favorite restaurant before you step foot in there again…the health food issues,” then I may actually watch the evening news.  The scare tactics do not get to me anymore, because if I believed it all I would be living in a padded cell where NOTHING could get to me.

And companies should always be looking at the LONG TERM, not the short term.

- Ellen Stevens