Archive for October, 2009
Our reality is less interesting than the story I will tell.
Friday, October 23rd, 2009 | | No Comments
This talk from TED sums up exactly my hesitation on focusing on photo documenting my experiences. The fact of the matter is that you just aren’t there. You are a journalist, behind a camera, disengaged from the situation at hand.
Contrast that with a recent experience I had going on a family vacation. One person did 99% of the documenting of the entire 5 day trip, shooting video, taking pictures, not all the time, but enough to capture the feel of the trip. Nobody else did much of any documentation. This person published the definitive account of the trip in DVD form, and gave it out to everybody who was on the trip. Were we all better off in this situation? I think so.
As a side-note, the concept of crafting one’s identity reminds me of the media feedback loop described on FRONTLINE some years ago. Have we only made things worse since then? What would flickr or facebook look like if they didn’t encourage this kind of behavior?
Update:
Paul Carr from TechCrunch makes a similar point in a recent post.