LONDON: The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. Today, we seem to be operating under a new and very different dictum: the unrecorded life is not worth living. Thanks to digital technologies, we now have the tools to chronicle our daily actions and thoughts in the minutest detail – and to share the record with the world.

The desire to bear witness to one’s personal experience isn’t anything new, of course. Long before words and pictures turned into strings of ones and zeroes, people set down accounts of events in their lives. They painted on cave walls, wrote in diaries, took snapshots and collected keepsakes and souvenirs. What’s changed is the scale of the effort. Whereas in the past we tended to record only important events, today we can, and do, record pretty much everything. Nothing we do or think, it seems, is too insignificant to be preserved or broadcast.

The self-recording craze seems to have begun with the arrival of cheap camcorders in the 1980s, when interminable videos of weddings, holidays and even births became common. But it has exploded with the proliferation of mobile phones, digital cameras, personal websites, blogs and podcasts.

What exactly is behind our rage to document the minutiae of our daily existence? That’s hard to say. Maybe it’s just another manifestation of modern-day narcissism. Maybe it’s a byproduct of our media-saturated culture, with its sense that nothing’s real until it’s been recorded and broadcast. Or maybe it goes deeper than that. In striving to preserve the moments of our lives, to immortalise them, might we simply be expressing our fear of death?As for Socrates, it’s hard to imagine that he’d be pleased with any of this. We’re so busy recording our lives that we have little time left to examine them. And perhaps that, more than anything else, is the real point.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service