Is it better to be doing something great
and creative, or is it better to be watching a video of yourself doing
something great and creative?
The answer seems obvious. It ought to be much more fulfilling to be
doing something great than watching yourself doing something great. But people seem to prefer watching the video.
Think of all the people who take pictures
of their lunch, and post it on Instagram.
Wouldn’t it be better just to enjoy the meal in front of you?
I realised how deeply this fascination with
watching our highlights on video runs when my two year-old son showed signs of
it. I can play the guitar a little, and
recently started to practise again for the first time since my son was
born. He watched me playing and
immediately wanted to get involved.
“Join Daddy play guitar!” he demanded. So I had to stop practising and let my son
sit beside me and pull some strings on the guitar. For a few weeks he was demanding to play the
guitar every day. He started to get
quite good at it. I made some chords
with my left hand and let him pull the strings to make a noise. He started to get the hang of plucking the
strings together to make a recognisable chord.
Then one day he started singing a song that one of his teachers plays at
his nursery. It is sung in Japanese and
is a song about vegetables. The lyrics
are something like, “Vegetable, vegetable, vegetable, vegetable! Tomato, tomato, tomato, tomato, yeah! Radish, radish, radish, radish, yeah!”
I don’t know how his nursery teacher plays
it but with my son and I playing together it sounded like a weird new genre of
nursery-punk. My wife heard us playing
and shot a video of the performance.
And that’s the sad part of the story. We made the mistake of showing our son the
video. From that moment he stopped
wanting to play the guitar. Now all he
wants to do is watch the video of his performance. “Watch video!
Watch video play guitar!” So the
nursery-punk vegetable star has retired from playing. And it’s all because of the power of selfie video.
Vocabulary:
fulfilling – causing happiness by allowing
someone’s character or abilities to develop fully
to pluck something – to pull the strings of
an instrument to make a noise
a selfie – a picture of yourself, taken by
yourself
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