… pre emptive dump
(When I first started this) Over the past few weeks, I’ve been in wedding/vacation/travel mode. The experience was great as an opportunity to disconnect from many of the stressors and facades of daily life and making connections and being present. In my teaching world I’m a massive proponent of face to face learning. But at the same time, I am a champion of technology (like photography and social media) and its ability to facilitate connections. These two ideas are, for some, hard to have in your head at the same time for some. It certainly was for some people I talked to while I was away. While I was away there wasn’t much going on for learning. There was however a huge amount of storytelling going on. And that storytelling was powered by presence and emotion.
Unlike a regular get away, wedding based trips are (perhaps by requisite) infused by drama. Some of that is good, some are not very good. The events related to the wedding are good drama. Family traditions and the passing of those traditions through generations is pure storytelling. Without a compelling reason to do a ceremony “the next time”, that element of the tradition will die. Some of you might note that this is the core of culture (Ha! There! Snuck in learning there!). Bad drama on the other hand isn’t something that you want to pass on, but because the story isn’t complete, many are compelled to participate (Ha! Again!). These two sides of the event identify in real life the core element of storytelling. It’s emotion. Without emotion, there isn’t a story.
Back to face to face, that’s where storytelling excels. Sure, a video can get half way there, but it is artificial. In real life, not participating in the live story that is unfolding before you means that you miss out. Unlike in video, you can’t just pay attention and be moved, you have to participate. Everyone participates in different ways. Some people are just passively watching, but they have an opportunity to immediately reflect and connect. Many people on the other hand are observing through a lens to be able to share. But is making an Instagram story reflecting and connecting? I would argue no. I wrote in the past that maybe those short social media stories are just the next step of how culture is propagated. Watching what was happening at the wedding showed a significant flaw with that idea. People just snapping away and sharing at the wedding didn’t seem to be “there”. For many, those stories did perform one useful function; to see the seed of a conversation. Through the multiple events of the wedding, because different people were there at different times, this was a good generalization. I did observe one situation where the lack of a social media crutch generated more conversation than expected.
At the reception during the dance, the bride was moving around the floor and dancing with her guests. As she came up to one individual who I had been talking to quite a bit through the week, this individual started to ask her to “wait for Insta to start”. I grabbed the phone from the individual and said “just dance”. Several minutes and many laughs and smiles later this individual came off the floor and I returned the phone. As the phone reattached to its person, I got a hand on the shoulder and a big “thank you”. I met this individual later in the night and was told that the lack of a phone/camera enabled presence that wasn’t anticipated. Later conversations were also richer because the other side of the conversation also needed to be present. This experience was motivating enough that the individual put their phone away save for a couple of selfies and said that they had “such a better time than expected”.
These anecdotes dovetail nicely into ideas within Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants. We are what we attend to and we need to reclaim the experience of living.
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