【新聞讀後感】「活在當下，或是紀錄這一刻？」
友人分享下方這則新聞，另一位朋友回應提到各種訊息工具，BBcall、E-mail、網路聊天室、即時通、MSN、FB、Line…等等，認為這是很自然發生的過程，因為類似的狀況，在以上這些產品出現時都可能有出現過，只是形式不同。
我的看法是：工具本來就是會演進，使用者的心態才是檢視各種現象的重點。
一樣自拍，人人心思不同。
所謂「流行」就是有某種想法、看法、做法的人在某一段期間占比很高，但可不代表所有人內在最細微的意圖皆相同。
「自拍」這行為，也許有人就是想讓自己開心、與人分享、炫耀行徑、純粹留念、影像日記、儀式習慣、掩飾無聊、覺得自己很美／帥.........等等等，但到底這麼做的「意圖」是什麼，可能要訪問當事人才清楚，不過也許當事人也不清楚，純粹就是跟隨潮流，沒有任何特殊目的，反正拍攝工具現在如此容易取得。
一件事看表面現象未必真，問為什麼而做，才可能知道較接近事實的真相，但也是被訪問者所認為的真相，不必然是核心真相。
所謂旁觀者清，沒人詢問當事人的話，當事人可能也沒發現自己在做什麼，為什麼做。
人們是很需要互相溝通交流的，因為我們的眼睛設計很輕易就看見外境、外界，唯獨難以看見自己心中真意。
或許這也是為什麼網路發達後，各種溝通工具氾濫發展，可見人們多需要有表達自己心聲的管道，管你有沒有聽聞注意（當然骨子裡人們還是會在意有沒有人注意，這是普通人性），我就是想讓你知道我在做什麼、想什麼。
站的角度不同，看的面向不同，但問心意必然較為準確。
現在無庸置疑是彰顯人們個體化／獨特性的時代。我們都一樣，我們也都不一樣。
新聞內容：
http://mag.udn.com/mag/edu/storypage.jsp?f_MAIN_ID=381&f_SUB_ID=3731&f_ART_ID=541905
祈禱或紀錄？ 瀕死前的手機自拍【聯合報╱By ALEX WILLIAMS╱莊蕙嘉譯】
To Live Life, or Record It? A Question for iPhone Age
JetBlue Flight 1416 was just minutes into its trip from Long Beach, California, to Austin, Texas, on Sept ember 18 when Scott Welch, a passenger in Seat 5A, heard a suspicious pop. Moments later, smoke began to fill the cabin, clogging the air to the point that he could see only a few rows in front of him, he said. The starboard engine of the Airbus A320, he soon learned, had blown.
As other passengers began to cry, and pray, he strapped on his oxygen mask and pondered his fate. “I understood that I might be going to meet God,” Mr. Welch, 34, recalled. He thought, “If this is my time, this is my time.”
Faced with his own mortality, he could have closed his eyes in quiet reflection. Instead, Mr. Welch, a sports photographer, responded in a distinctly 2014 manner: He reached for his Samsung Galaxy Note 3 smartphone, thrust it into the murky air and pressed the record button. He even found the presence of mind to record a smiling selfie.
Never mind that the plane landed safely , making the mechanical failure a relative nonevent. The pulse-quickening, you-are-there footage captured by Mr. Welch and other passengers helped propel the story to national news. Mr. Welch’s two brief videos, meanwhile, went viral; one attracted more than one million views.
9月18日，捷藍航空1416號班機從加州長堤前往德州奧斯汀，剛起飛數分鐘。坐在5A座位的威爾許聽到一個可疑聲響。他說，不久後煙霧瀰漫機艙，空氣差到只能看得到前面幾排座位。他很快就發現這架空中巴士A320飛機右舷的引擎爆炸了。
其他乘客開始哭泣祈禱，威爾許戴上氧氣面罩思索命運。34歲的他回想：「我想可能要去見上帝了。如果命該如此，就認命唄。」
面臨死亡，他大可閉目靜靜回顧人生。身為運動攝影師的威爾許卻做出2014年式的反應：拿出三星Galaxy Note 3智慧手機，高舉至煙霧瀰漫的空氣中，按下錄影鍵。他甚至有心情自拍笑容。
總之飛機安全著陸，機械故障未釀意外。威爾許與其他乘客拍的令人脈搏加速、彷彿身歷其境的影片上了全國新聞。威爾許拍的兩支短片皆在網路瘋傳，其中一支觀看人次破百萬。
It is no longer enough to record seemingly every moment of life with your smartphone, it seems. Near death is fair game, too.
Thanks to the Personal Video Industrial Complex — tens of millions of video-enabled smartphones, feeding countless hours daily to video-sharing behemoths like YouTube — rock concerts, presidential inaugurations, school plays and even midair near disasters can all be considered “content” now, inspiring us all to record the event for posterity.
But even as publ ic gatherings, from the world-historical to the intimate, evolve into a sea of glowing blue screens, a backlash has started to take root. An assortment of critics — mindfulness gurus, twee indie rockers, even, seemingly, Pope Francis — have started to implore these armchair videographers to drop their phones and start living again.
To live the moment or record the moment? It’s become a defining issue of the iPhone age.
用智慧手機記錄生活的每一刻似乎不夠，瀕死也是不錯的題材。
拜「個人影片產業集合體」之賜，數以千萬計用智慧手機拍的影片，每天餵養YouTube這類影音分享巨獸，搖滾演唱會、總統就職、學校舞台劇，甚至險些發生的空難，現在都可視為「內容」，讓我們樂得拍下供後代觀賞。
但就在公開場合活動，從歷史性全球事件到私人活動，都走進一片藍色螢幕海之際，反彈卻也出現了。各領域的批評家：心靈導師、獨立搖滾音樂人、甚至好像包括天主教教宗方濟各，都開始苦勸這些脫離現實的攝影家們，放下手機，重新開始過生活。
要活在當下或是記錄這一刻？這已成為iPhone時代的關鍵性問題。
“Is it more important that we actually live these experiences than obsessively record and upload them to the cloud?” asked William Powers, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and author of “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.” “Absolutely. Will most people therefore learn to be more in-themoment and swear off excessive pictures and videos? I doubt it.”
For news obsessives, such talk might conjure images of the viral Vatican shots after Pope Francis’s election in 2013. The images, posted to social media by NBC News, purported to show a contrast between the relatively phone-free crowd in St. Peter’s Square that greeted Pope Benedict XVI’s election in 2005 and the thousand-points-of-smartphonelight that greeted Pope Francis .
True, the story turned out to be a bit more complicated. As The Washington Post later reported, the “before” shot was actually from the funeral procession of Pope John Paul II, a setting where smartphone use would seem inappropriate. Even so, the “after” shot proved indelible, perhaps even to the pontiff himself.
麻省理工學院媒體實驗室科學家、《哈姆雷特也愛瘋：數位書房的哲學家》一書作者鮑爾斯問道：「我們親身體會一個經驗，是否比著魔似地將它錄影並上傳到雲端重要？當然。至於多數人是否因此學會享受當下，戒掉狂拍照片和影片？我懷疑。」
對於新聞迷，這番談話令人想起2013年梵蒂岡選出新教宗方濟各時，傳遍全球的照片。由國家廣播公司上傳至社群網站的照片，顯示2005年本篤十六世當選教宗時，擠滿聖伯多祿廣場的群眾手上看不到什麼手機；歡迎教宗方濟各時，廣場上有數千個手機光點。
實情更複雜些。華盛頓郵報之後報導，號稱2005年教宗選舉的照片，其實攝於教宗若望保祿二世的喪禮，那種場合使用手機本就不宜。儘管如此，2013年的照片卻是如假包換，對教宗本人而言或許亦然。
As with any discussion involving social media, it’s easy to write off the phenomenon as a pandemic of narcissism. We live in a culture, after all, that can support a Tumblr called Selfies at Funerals, filled with precisely that.
Academics have made that connection. A 2013 study by Jean W. Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, and two colleagues, looked at more than 760,000 American books published between 1960 and 2008. It found that first-person plural pronouns (“we,” “us”) declined by 10 percent, while first-person singular pronouns (“I,” “me”) increased 42 percent. To Professor Twenge, an author of a 2009 book called “The Narcissism Epidemic,” this is part of the same societal shift. “That’s what video is: It’s my experience,” Professor Twenge said.
She might get little debate from Mr. Welch, the JetBlue chronicler .
“I sound hypocritical because of what I did,” Mr. Welch said, but he said he finds the widespread obsession to upload to the web every random moment in life “a little extreme.” Still, he realizes that there are reasons beyond vanity to reach for your phone .
“I was considering the fact that my family might not see me again,” he said. “After I started filming, that’s why I turned it on myself.” He added: “I wanted my family to see me smile.”
在所有關於社群媒體的討論中，常輕易把這種現象解釋為自戀流行病。畢竟我們生活在這樣的文化中，在Tumblr加上「喪禮自拍」的主題亦無不可。
學界建立了這樣的連結。聖地牙哥州立大學心理學教授珍．特蘭吉和兩位同事2013年所作研究，檢視超過76萬冊1960至2008年間出版的美國書籍，發現使用第一人稱複數代名詞（我們）者減少10%，而使用第一人稱單數代名詞（我）者增加了42%。身為2009年書籍《自戀流行病》作者，特蘭吉認為這是社會變遷的一部分。她說：「影片的意義就是：這是我的經驗。」
她和捷藍航空事件記錄者威爾許的看法若合符節。威爾許說：「我做過的事或許讓我聽起來有些假道學。」不過他覺得著魔似地上傳各種生活片段到網路「有點極端」。然而他認為拿起手機錄影除了虛榮之外還有其他原因。
他說：「當時我想，家人可能再見不到我了，所以開始錄影後我才會把鏡頭朝向自己。我要家人看到我微笑的樣子。」
