Outsourced
Memes usually don’t take my breath away. They are, in fact, meant to disrupt our psychology for a split second. Their content meant to either re-enforce or shatter a belief.
I usually ignore them, but the problem is, they’re everywhere.
Everywhere being the one place we can’t escape from: our technology.
There was one, however, that stopped me in my tracks, and of course, I came across it mindless scrolling one app or another.
The photo was this: a stadium-type event from the “before days” with a front row of fans looking in awe at whatever they were watching—a performer, an athlete, a monster truck, who knows.
All of the people in the picture were watching this thing but they all had their cameras in front of their faces trying to capture the moment.
That is, all but one person. An elderly woman was wedged amongst those eager, phone-wielding fans simply smiling at the spectacle.
Her eyes had a real sparkle of joy, unlike her crowd mates on either side, who were indeed experiencing the event, but were also distracted by trying to frame it, hold it, and shoot it.
The meme headline read: She’s the only one truly living in the moment.
And so I ask, how sustainable is phone/camera usage for our humanity?
When does the phone become a proxy for our brain’s natural ability to capture and make memories?
Now. That time is now. We’ve very easily outsourced our frontal lobe’s job to a very sleek, handheld operating system.
Does said front lobe, our glorious hippocampus, just shrivel up?
Probably not, but as time goes on, our psychology changes, and so do the synapses in our brain. Perhaps, instead of just smiling and watching something unfold like the woman in the meme, the new meme is as such:
When we think there’s a moment worth capturing, our new forearm tech-appendage instinctually goes up in front of our faces, our brain working only on how best to hold the image before it slips away into reality.
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Photo by Mantas Hesthaven on Unsplash
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