I googled "psychology of taking pictures" a day after attending a huge graduation ceremony at the also huge Riverside Church in New York City. The event was dominated not by the several articulate speakers, the 2000 graduates themselves, nor even by the resonant chords of the magnificent organ, but rather by the frenzy of many attendees recording the procedings with cameras (the length of rocket launchers) and video equipment.

A family in front of me spent the entire two hour ceremony examining, discussing and fiddling with its equipment. That is when one of them was not leaping out of the row for a new angle on God knows what. At several points the long aisle separating graduates from the parents, friends, etc. was entirely filled with a phalanx of amateur photographers and video cams. Not only were none of these people paying attention to the actual event at which they were present, their intrusiveness had the same effect on at least some of us who were aiming at experiencing rather than recording. I saw nothing in the people around me to suggest that people could record and experience.

I don't know what all this means, but it seems unhealthy if not, in some cases, a perverse effort to control reality instead of join with it.

Galen Tinder

But also, in truth, by my best understanding of languagwes (and someone please correct me if I am wrong) we have never really understood emotions until the dawning realizations of present day. Until 1867, when William James (United States) and James Lange (Great Britain) needed a aterm to describe what they were researching, there was no word (again, as far as I know...) for the grand category we now call "emotion." The word itself was lifted from the French, but there it meant only pathos.

Sharon Gerstenzang, Ph.D.
author of a Unified Theory of Emotion

Dr Fox, yes, absolutely!

I'm trying to pull out some broad generalisations here about our culture - always dangerous as exceptions are inevitable. You've drawn attention to two classes of people who probably don't have the average person's relationship with music and film: musicians and film critics. I would suggest other people are not quite as attentive.

I certainly wouldn't want to live without recording technologies, but we have to be aware what they might be doing to us and what they represent.

Professionally I teach film and literature. Technology has revolutionized the viewing of film, as often for the better as for the worse: film critics, for example, are much more accurate now than they were before the VCR, when it wasn't unusual to find an article about a film that contained glaring errors about the plot. If I am writing about a scene in a film, I'll watch it in slow motion, at double speed, with the sound off, again and again. I'd also point out that the claim that people "really listened" before modern technology intervened isn't historically accurate--both concert halls and movie theaters used to be noisier, busier places, where some chitchat with your neighbor was perfectly normal. The silent concert hall is a modern invention, one that was encouraged by recording technology (it also encouraged an expectation of technically flawless playing).

Finally, if you were to make the same kind of claim about literature, it wouldn't make sense--although Plato felt precisely that writing would destroy the live performance of poetry, and our "mindfulness" and memory of it. I don't think we'd be better off without the written word, nor do I think it made us less "mindful" of our world. Quite the contrary.