by Ben West and Sean Huntley
News Editor and Graphic Designer    
   
    “SEAN HAROLD HUNTLEY: Writing an El Gato article right now, lulz.” How often do we find ourselves compelled to inform the world on how we are doing instead of just experiencing it? When was the last time you did something incredible, and it did not end up as a photo album?

     It seems we are living through our experiences instead of living in them. Without even realizing it, we have fallen into a habit of feeding every event, every decision, every moment into one giant documentary. Social networking has become our motive. Everything we used to do for the sake of doing it, we now do to maintain our online identities. Maybe we are afraid that if we stop putting up our status updates, stop uploading our photo albums, stop commenting on anything and everything, our online identity will disappear.

    Do not get me wrong — being able to tell all our friends how we are feeling at once is great, but perhaps we are missing the point. Talking through electronic mediums is not the same as speaking with someone face to face. For instance, a text message is a great way to compartmentalize an idea into no more than two-hundred and fifty characters. It is a great way to throw information out there, but something is lost in translation. We lose meaning when we take the complex events of our lives and squeeze them through our cell phones. We miss all of the great moments, and all of the ugly ones. Most people text instead of talk because they feel like certain issues do not warrant a conversation, or at least a real one. As we grow more efficient at reducing our lives to a character count, we lose patience and understanding. We lose depth.

   In addition to compressing our conversations, we are also lessening the impact of our experiences by ritualistically photographing every event we attend and every moment we enjoy. The time we spend trying to figure out how we look in a photograph or how others will see it on the social network is time lost from experiencing these times in their entirety. Vacations become photo shoots, and the time we should spend living in the moment is spent planning for the future image. Picking up a camera creates a distance between us and what we experience. The moment we pick up a camera, we change our emphasis from the immediate to the retrospective. In our minds the moment has already passed. This is not an argument against photography; there is beauty and importance in a photo, but we should not lose the forest for the trees. When we take a picture, we are no longer thinking about what the experience means to us; we are saving it for later in the hopes that a couple pixels can tell us what it meant. We are constantly becoming less comfortable with letting the moment die, but the irony is that in so doing we lose the moment we were trying to save.

    We have developed a habit of outsourcing our experience to the cell phone. This one device has become the medium by which we communicate with our friends and family. We have condensed our interactions with others to a few sound bytes. And all of the time, no matter what conversations we may be having, the cell phone is always there — ready to distract, ready to pull us away. How many conversations have been ruined by a cell phone? No matter how important the talk may be, the phone call always demands our attention first.

    So what are we to do? Again, we are not fighting against networking, cameras, or cell phones. They are all tools that we need in our lives at one point or another. Obviously, no one wants to do anything radical. No one wants to throw his or her phone in the trash. But we do not have to. The call to action here is not to change our lives, but to change one moment, one adventure, one conversation. Just once go to a concert without a camera and with the phone turned off. Then when you get home, do not post anything about it on Facebook. Just once talk with a close friend with your phones off, and just keep talking until you run out of things to say. No one needs to change the world here, but the true gems in these moments of our lives cannot be found unless we actually live these moments out. Life is filled to the brim with beautiful things right now. Let us focus on that first, before we start thinking about the future.