The Unrecorded Moment
Item No. 22
“We press record and then we view our own lives as directors and actors, but, perhaps, not often enough as ourselves.”The unrecorded moment.
What is the unrecorded moment? Usually we wait a bit to clarify just why we’ve listed something in The (Death of a) Thing: The Last Catalog. But in this case, let’s clarify why up front.
It’s pretty clear already, isn’t it?
We’re not even sure what an unrecorded moment is. That’s because for the most part in a social media driven world, we’re incentivized to share pretty much everything all the time with everyone. So it's hard to remember when we didn’t simply just record all our moments.
It's hard to remember an unrecorded moment.
We list unrecorded moments in The Last Catalog because nowadays we record pretty much all our moments. Our digital drives and memories are full, but our own memory, of our own life?
Not so much.
And let’s be clear: Our life is a lot of moments! There are approximately 2.2 billion seconds in a human life, that is roughly 38 million minutes. By the way, is a minute a moment? Well, it depends how you define a moment, but some say it’s more or less equivalent to 60 seconds, or one minute passing us by. Maybe even that explanation of a moment is just a constructed idea, but let’s assume that for the sake of this entry in our catalog, a minute is more or less a moment.
Now we pressure ourselves to record many of our lives minutes—that is, moments.
Smartphone devices in hand, we press record and then we view our own lives as directors and actors, but, perhaps not often enough as ourselves.
We’re performing our lives for an audience of other people, and so we need lots of recorded moments. And platforms like TikTok and other platforms incentivize us to share our experiences, our what would be otherwise private moments mostly, for public access, and clicks! (That is likes.) Thumbs’ ups’.
The thing is that as we move forward, our smartphones are just the beginning, now we can record “high-quality” videos discreetly, with technologies like wearable technology, smart sunglasses, for example. One university newsletter opinion-writer pointed out that this might come in handy to prevent a crime, but it also puts everyone on the spot to never make a mistake. “In the past, these moments could be easily forgotten,” the student author said.
But not so much anymore. We’ll never forget a moment if we can help it.
Now the moment, no matter how poor that dancing might have been, is recorded (forever.) Now there is some chatter that (slow)-dancing is out too, by the way. Kids aren’t dancing? (See: Future Catalog entry Dancing?) Does the recorded moment kill something like dancing, too?
The price of the loss of our unrecorded moments is our presence, isn’t it? Recording a moment for someone else, our audience, in some ways, presumes that we spent our time on everyone else and not on our own life. That leaves us with a life of approximately 2.2 billion seconds, 38 million minutes, that is moments, un-noticed by us for ourselves. The price of the loss of an unrecorded moment is also the loss of a place to be goofy, unafraid, to stumble, and to forget and to move on.
We lose the performance-free self, too, don’t we? And also the possibility of "easily forgotten" things (as that student put it.)
We lose privacy, too, a bit, don’t we? The feeling of never worrying about being watched (all the time.)
That probably also means that we lose a kind of trust in each other, sort of always wondering who has the record button pressed on?
Other Specifications:
Specifications for unrecorded moments?
Well, what if we didn’t record all our moments?
Would we pay closer attention to our own lives?
After all, our life’s moments only ever happen as far as we know, just once. Un-replayable, if we don’t record it.
We have to remember the moments we don’t record with our own human brains, so our brain matter seems to be in play here too.
More Specifications:
Witnessing, not documenting.
Memory, our own (not the devices.)
We must empty the theaters (that is the virtual theater we’re always imagining for ourselves.) The virtual audience that we’re living our performative life for.
Do you remember when…?
(See (Future) Catalog entries for: Forgetting, Privacy, Boredom.)