For 2015: eyes wide open, devices down and dark

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When you went to your grandson’s Christmas pageant two weeks ago, did you actually see his performance, or were you too busy recording it for posterity on your iPhone? When your granddaughter lit the Hanukkah candles, did you catch the light in her eyes, or did you snap and shoot and miss the moment?

These days, increasingly, we sacrifice real-time experience for cheap facsimiles sent to the cloud, sometimes never to be seen again. People take pictures of their food before they eat it; they torment their kids with demands for poses and smiles and inauthentic “happy” faces. Travelers elbow one another, pointing and shooting, aiming and clicking instead of actually watching a spectacular sunset into the sea.

Anyone else notice that we’re losing ourselves in the mess of gigabytes and pixels and electronic connectivity?

This realization hit me hard at the end of my recent trip to India and Africa. We were away for several weeks, and spent most days on tours — long bus rides to out-of-the-way places that we’d read about in books. What I noticed was that people don’t actually see very much. They point their cameras, phones or iPads at the Taj Mahal or Table Mountain, and they shoot. They rush to be first to see an elephant in a clearing, then they hold up a device in front of their face and capture an image rather than just looking for a moment, and absorbing the experience without the distraction.

My resolution for 2015 is to see more and record less, to keep my eyes wide open and my portable devices in “off” mode.

My personal enlightenment came the usual way — through disaster. We traveled with a camera, an iPhone and my Mac laptop — already a technology overload. Like most people on our trip, we kept in touch with a steady flurry of emails back and forth to friends and family in the Five Towns. That in itself changes a travel experience. There was a time when you packed your steamer trunk, boarded a ship and sailed off the grid for weeks or months. Now the Internet connections stretch around the world, 24/7. It’s a mixed blessing, at best.

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