If this belongs in the P/R section, please feel free to move, but...
The thought struck me in the "humor" thread... are we hurting ourselves with the current trend of filming and observing EVERYTHING?
I'm doing my ancestral tree right now, and I'm sort of stuck at the "late 1800's/early 1900's" timeframe, in all four (counting my grandparents) limbs of the tree. That's primarily because that's when my families transitioned to the States. There is literally nothing other than church records that my ancestors even existed (as such, I've come to the rationalization that there are no George Washington's or Napoleon Bonaparte's in my tree. No Adolph Hitler's or Josef Stalin's either, so that's good, I guess). But I watch my grandson - rather, his parents - and EVERYTHING is not only documented - we did that with still photos - but video'd and put on Snapgram and Facechat and Instabook. There is a record of just about everything, and I'm not sure that that is a good thing.
Why? Because we as human's are not equipped for that level of scrutiny. Think about it. EVERYTHING is subject to documentation, and we have to maintain that level of consciousness of our activities to sustain it. "Where were you Friday?" "Oh, I went out with some buddies for a beer." "Oh yeah? Who's the chippy with her titties hanging all over your arm?" A friend of mine found some photos of his wife en flagrante delicto, and some of the details of the photos didn't exactly match the story he was given during the courting phase. Is she lying? Hiding something? Or is this just a first-hand example of the extremely well-documented phenomenon that our memories suck - badly - at the details of our lives, in favor of the broad strokes of our experience and our learning.
Then what then about the selective presentation of our lives? We can arrange these photos and videos in a way that's unrealistic. That captures the side of us we want others to see and obscures the sides we don't... until of course they inevitably come forward (examples of this are both my friend's wife and, say, Harvey Weinstein and his ilk). THEN, of course, you factor in the written aspect of this scrutiny - the Twitter, the Facebook - and you have a model of us that psychologically I don't know is healthy or sustainable.
Could this be part of why we're seeing what seems to be (both anecdotally and statistically) the explosion of what some might call negative behaviors? Increased prescription drug use, increased anxiety and depression, increased aggression and violence, even increased partisanship (politically)? We have what I observe is this increasingly burning desire to be RIGHT, to be ACKNOWLEDGED, and I wonder if it isn't rooted in an increasing degree to which we are NOT right and NOT acknowledged in other parts of our lives where we were previously so.
Thoughts?