Representational image (Reuters)<\/p>\n
As other passengers began to cry and pray, Welch strapped on his oxygen mask and pondered his fate. <\/p>\n
\"I understood that I might be going to meet God,\" Welch, 34, recalled. He thought, \"If this is my time, this is my time.\" <\/p>\n
Faced with his own mortality, he could have closed his eyes in quiet reflection. Instead, 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. <\/p>\n
Never mind that the plane landed safely soon after, making the mechanical failure a relative nonevent. The pulse-quickening, you-are-there footage captured by Welch and other passengers helped propel the story to national news. Welch's two brief videos, meanwhile, went viral; one attracted more than 1 million views. <\/p>\n
It is no longer enough to record seemingly every last moment of life with your smartphone, it seems. Near-death is fair game, too. <\/p>\n
Thanks to the Personal Video Industrial Complex - tens of millions of video-enabled smartphones, feeding countless hours daily to video-sharing behemoths - rock concerts, presidential inaugurations, fourth-grade school plays and even midair near-disasters can all be considered \"content\" now, inspiring us all to tap our inner Edward R. Murrow and record the event for posterity. <\/p>\n
But even as public gatherings, from the world-historical to the intimate, evolve into a sea of glowing blue screens, a backlash has started to take root. An improbable assortment of critics - mindfulness gurus, twee indie rockers, even, seemingly, Pope Francis - have started to implore these armchair videographers to drop their phones and actually start living again. <\/p>\n
To live the moment or record the moment? It's become a defining dilemma of the iPhone age. <\/p>\n
\"Is it more important that we actually live these experiences than obsessively record and upload them to the cloud?\" asked William Powers, a research scientist at the MIT 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-the-moment and swear off excessive pictures and videos? I doubt it.\" <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The rest is here: <\/p>\n
Your Time Could Be Up. Is It a Good Time to Upload?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Representational image (Reuters) As other passengers began to cry and pray, Welch strapped on his oxygen mask and pondered his fate. \"I understood that I might be going to meet God,\" 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 Continue reading