The Read Write Web wonders if the time we spend digitally capturing and communicating every aspect of our lives is blocking us from actually enjoying life.
Thanks to technology, we never have to forget any experience of our lives. We can snap photos, annotate them, and share them with others instantly. We can archive them to the timeless web for posterity. And maybe one day, our great-great-grandkids can pursue our social network profiles in the cached pages of Internet Archive and learn everything we ever wanted the world to know about us.
And yes, that’s great. It’s amazing, really. But what about us and the lifetime we spent recording these things? Did we waste our lives documenting them and forget to live?
I’m sure a compelling argument could be made for the premise, and there are probably sociologists in the process of studying this particular phenomena.
And there certainly are folks who go overboard in attempting to document every event, major and minor. Just as some will go to excess in other activities.
However, for many people I know, capturing and communicating what they see around them has simply become a significant segment of their lives, not a substitute for it.
I have always enjoyed the things I do – writing, coding, travel, etc. But these things all came to life for me, became that much more enjoyable, and that much more intensely experience, when shared with everyone else.