'We Are A Camera' By Nick Paumgarten

As a kid, my father used to take my brother and I to many different types of concerts as part of his company. The artists ranged from old washed up rock bands like Styx and Boston to more current country shows like Rascal Flatts or Zac Brown Band. Each time we would go we would sing and dance and have so much fun that by the time the encore came around, you could find my brother and I both passed out in our seats. I remember these experiences so vividly even from my childhood because my entire attention was primarily focused on who was playing and I wasn’t distracted by anything else. In Nick Paumgarten’s essay, “We Are a Camera”, we are introduced to the GoPro camera through the different stories of people using them, or misusing them, to
I disagree. Life is footage only if you make it footage. In the very first story in the essay, the story of Chase and the herd of elk is a perfect example of an instance of technology becoming a distraction. If a herd of 30 huge elk came rolling close to me, the last thing I would do is think about how I’m going to record the moment. But, when this opportunity for him to capture an experience like this on camera, his GoPros were not turned on, and he couldn’t get that chance back to get rare footage to be able to sell. Our society today wants to record every single thing that happens to be able to say that you were present for it. Students, children, and even adults live in this “heads down” culture where all of our attention is focused on a five-inch-tall piece of technology, and when a special moment in time comes up, an individual is never really present for it. There is always something that is holding him back from absolutely placing the experience at the forefront of a person’s being. Paumgarten states that even an event so simple yet monumental in a child’s life like learning how to swim is now blown out of proportion by the presence of a camera (333). He is making a point in saying that even the little experiences that adults and children go through are now amplified when a recording is posted on social media or shown to other audiences through other ways. Instead of the world consisting of seven continents,
They become devalued by becoming ordinary. For example, a wedding or a birth of a child are events on people’s lives that created a long lasting effect on them as well as the people around them. But just because a video was taken of your baby being born or your wedding, doesn’t mean it should become a championship trophy that you take on a parade down Michigan Ave. It is for your personal safe keeping only. Social media entices us to abuse the values we hold true to ourselves by becoming part of the “look-at-me age”, mentioned by Paumgarten (333). In reference to the GoPros, he states, “What might have been just another camcorder became the leading connector between what goes on in the real world and what goes on in the virtual one” (333). People have become influenced by the reactions people get as a result of seeing their videos that creates an egotistical charisma that becomes the norm. Instead of investing into the experience itself, we often get sidetracked by what it will look like through the audience’s eyes instead of your