DOCUMENTIA

one of the main reasons i rarely use facebook, and use twitter as a mostly media feed

I have a Facebook friend who has problems with memory retention. The only way he can recall details of events is to look at photographs he has taken. He's had the problem all his life only to find it worsening as he gets older.

My dad had similar problems before he died. After his heart bypass surgery he was never the same. He lost track of time and confused details and chronology. His solution was to carry around one of those day-at-a-glance calendars and write down the details of his day as each hour passed and to collect mementos within the pages of that calendar. He'd then refer back to it days, weeks and years later if he had to try to remember something.

When he died, there were dozens of years worth of those calendars in his apartment. The people who cleaned out the place before I got there to take care of things didn't recognize the importance of such things to his family members and they were tossed out.

I guess the difference in these two people and the documentia that you describe is that these two did it for themselves and only themselves. They didn't plaster it all over the internet or relentlessly share it with others via emails and IMs.

I don't get what you're sayin' here, Deej . . . you don't use FB or twitter because people obsessively record their lives?

I can see how people can enjoy the event while documenting it at the same time. It's just advanced multitasking. What bothers me while standing behind these wild animals is when they're so oblivious to their own obsessive behavoir that they don't realize that their detracting from the enjoyment of others while they act like defacto walls by blocking the view of the event that everyone is supposed to be allowed to see their own fair share of.

As for me? I tend to go to the opposite and not document enough of my activities. I was chided yesterday for not taking a photograph of the pumpkin I carved last week. I had to throw it away yesterday because it got too moldy. I don't have a decent camera and I don't care for the camera on my phone so I don't bother taking loads of photographs and document much of my life activities etc....

How do you know that you're in the 21st century then DJ if you don't Facebook or Twitter?

sort of, not so much facebook, but twitter is horrible, for awhile there was this trend for this social app called foresquare, the more you went to a place the better your standing, you could become the virtual mayor of your local starbucks, really annoying to just get endless tweets, at the mall, at the dry cleaners, at the bank, mayor of chuck e cheese

for a while i was ******* around with the # (hashtag thing) posting song titles like "the mayor of simpleton (xtc), or "king in a catholic style (china crisis) followed by the hashtag #foresquared peg in a round hole

i basically dropped most of the people i followed and just follow mostly media sites to see what's going on in music, books etc

Sounds like a form of hoarding.

I don't use facebook or twitter, and very much feel I'm in the 21st century, thank you.

I'm pretty much convinced there is no such thing as "advanced multi-tasking", just doing a whole bunch of stuff at the same time, but none of them well at that moment.

What this sports fan thinks is that people spend way too much time taking pictures, instead of just living in what is going on in that picture.

Do people ever really take a look at all those pictures?

Hmmmmm. I have mixed feelings on it.

I've spent a lot of hours with a camera in front of my face. It wasn't really a desire to document my life but it provided a social barrier that I confess I enjoyed. I could be a part of things without really having to participate. I was the fly on the wall. I like being the fly on the wall.

Mo kind of changed things for me. When he was little I shot everything and then one day I noticed that I was missing the experience of things. Being a fly on the wall didn't work anymore.

Analyzing and composing (pictures or text) really takes quite a bit of concentration. It does divorce you from the action.

I remember things in a much richer way having learned to put the camera down.

Wouldn't it better be called documania?

Here's some examples of pictures of people "documenting" their exciting life, as if taking the picture meant a damn thing.
These are so annoying.

Wow! Me and Crystal partying on some random Saturday night, like we've never been out of the house before!




Remember that time we were eating?
Never forget.

Saw a girl walking around the mall today taking pics of herself doing a squeeze a fart version of the "duck face*". Just something to do, I guess


*Duck face:

I agree completely about "multi-tasking." It's a myth. Study after study of multi-tasking has shown that all the efforts suffer, all the efforts are far less productive than would be the case if that amount of time were allocated to the task without other distraction.

Yup, that's what i was getting at.

I was just using the term which had been used in the radio progarm. I think their idea was that it's a mental health condition.

Hingehead posted this in the Geek and Nerd Humor thread. This is an example of something worth documenting, rather than every day **** like getting drunk with your girlfriends. Note that quite a few people in the crowd have their cellphones and cameras up to record the event:

I must be hard core curmudgeon, I wouldn't of thought of taking a video of that, just watched.

I just would have watched, too. However, taking pix or vids of that makes more sense than missing your kid's birthday party because you're parked behind a lens, or posting pix on FB of you slobbering drunk Saturday night.

It does make more sense.

However, in this case, you were able to find a quality version of the video on youtube, obviously taken by a professional hired to document the occasion.

All the people holding up their phones or laptops were just getting shitty shaky camera versions that started at some mid point of the performance.

I've never put this into words before, but often times I imagine myself (as far as this subject) as someone living long long ago.

How in the world did people remember events that happened in their lives, what people looked like, 500, 1000, 2000, 3000 years ago?
I'm not against videos and photography per se. It seems as though it's like a crutch today, like it didn't happen it we didn't hit the record button.

At the dawn of photography, when a person or group had their picture taken, it seemed to mean something. Now, it's just more crap 90% of the time.