Recently the Barbican museum in London held an exhibition called the Rain Room.
It was an installation in which water poured from the ceiling, but sensors detected where people were standing and would turn off the taps above their heads so they didn’t get wet. It was a clever and engaging piece of interactive art and was immensely popular. During the time this installation was open, my Twitter stream was filled with photos of people standing in the Rain Room, accompanied by the caption ‘Rain Room @ The Barbican!’ and a location attachment to prove that they were indeed in the Rain Room.

      最近倫敦Barbican博物館舉辦了一個叫“雨室”的展覽：一個房間，水從天花板各處灑下來，但參觀的遊客不會被淋濕，因為天花板上面會有感測器檢測到人所站的位置，關掉他們正頭頂的龍頭。這是項有趣而聰明的交互藝術，所以很受歡迎。這個展覽開放的當下，我的Twitter上常見到人們站在雨室中的照片，標題通常是“雨室@Barbican!”，當然，還有能證明他們確實到過那的位置資訊。

      This stream of homogenous photos got me thinking. What were people actually saying by Tweeting about their visit? They certainly weren’t sharing some hidden gem with their followers, nor were they bringing a unique interpretation of the artwork to the table. Ultimately, all they were doing was fulfilling the obligation that we have to Share. Not sharing in the sense of treasuring a moment with people close to us, but Sharing in the sense of ‘notify the world that I am doing a thing’.

      這些看起來都差不多的照片讓我開始想，他們真正想表達的是什麼？顯然，他們不是在同關注者分享什麼奇珍異寶，也沒有給出對這藝術作品的獨特見解。說起來，他們只是覺得他們應該分享，不是與親近的人分享快樂時光的那種分享，而是“告訴世界我在做一件事情”的那種分享。

      I’ve just spent a month in Singapore. Throughout the first couple of weeks I felt a constant nagging that everyone back home had to know what was going on. I felt like I should be photographing everything I did as proof; that all the exotic food I was eating and the sights I was seeing wouldn’t really matter if they weren’t digitally logged in a data centre somewhere in Utah. I found myself taking pictures purely to convey what an amazing time I was having, so that my friends would see it on their smartphones whilst riding the bus back in London and be impressed.

      我剛剛在新加坡待了一個月。最初的幾個星期，總覺得要讓家裡人知道我在幹嘛，就得多拍幾張照片來證明，比如那些吃過的異國佳餚和看到的風景，如果不把它們數位化回存到猶他州的某個資料中心，好像它們就會變得無關緊要。我發現拍照純粹是為了表達自己在歡度美好時光，這樣倫敦的朋友坐巴士回家時就可以在他們的手機上看到了

      It’s natural to want to share experiences with the people you care about. After all, the classic postcard greeting is ‘Wish you were here’. But I think our reasons for sharing experiences on social media are more cynical than that. It’s not sharing, it’s bragging. When we log in to Facebook or Twitter we see an infinitely updating stream of people enjoying themselves. It’s not real life, of course, because people overwhelmingly post about the good things whereas all the crappy, dull or deep stuff doesn’t get mentioned. But despite this obvious superficiality, it subconsciously makes us feel like everyone is having a better time than us. We try to compete by curating our own life experiences to make it look like we’re also having non-stop fun and doing important things. It breeds in us a Pavlovian response that means every time something good is happening to us we must broadcast it to as many people as possible.

      想要同你關心的人分享體驗是很自然的，如同傳統的明信片所傳達的意思，“要是你也在這就好了。”但我總覺得我們之所以要在社交網路上分享似乎卻有著更詭異的原因。其實那根本不是分享，更像是“吹牛”。每次我們登陸Facebook或者Twitter, 總能看見大家似乎都過的挺開心。這當然不是真實的生活，只是人們通常只會願意貼出“好東西”，而避而不談那些無聊、糟糕或是深沉的玩意。撇開浮誇不談，這種偏好會使得我們下意識中感覺，好像其他人都過得比我們好！ 我們試圖通過精心修飾自己的生活，顯得我們一直過的很開心，在做著重要的事情，以此來較勁。久而久之甚至形成了條件反射：每當有什麼好事發生的時候，我們一定得廣播給越多人知道越好。

      There are plenty of ‘Facebook is bad for you because X’ posts, but I’m talking about a mindset that goes beyond any single web service. This is the curse of our age. We walk around with the tools to capture extensive data about our surroundings and transmit them in real-time to the bedrooms and pockets of friends, family and every acquaintance we’ve made in the past eight years. We end up with a diminished perception of reality because we’re more concerned about choosing a good Instagram filter for our meal than we are about how it tastes. We become Martian rovers, trundling around our environment, uploading data without the ability or desire to make any sense of it. Ultimately, we end up externalising our entire lives.

      網上有很多《Facebook會給你帶來危害因為XXX》的文章，但我試圖談的是一種使用任何網路服務都會產生的心態。這是時代的詛咒。我們拿著那些數碼工具，把身邊這樣或那樣的資料一股腦兒抓下來，然後即時傳輸到親戚、朋友或是過去八年裡認識的每一個人。我們對現實的感覺變的越來越弱：吃飯時，我們更關心Instgram那個濾鏡效果好看，而不是面前的菜到底好不好吃。我們仿佛變成了好奇號火星探測車，在周邊環境裡轉來轉去，盲目地上傳著資料，而失去了探求意義的能力或願望。最終，我們外化了整個生活。

      I don’t think that it’s inherently wrong to want to keep the world updated about what you’re doing. But when you go through life robotically posting about everything you do, you’re not a human being. You’re just a prism that takes bits of light and sound and channels them into The Cloud, to be stored with all the other bits of light and sound from everyone else. You become nothing more than the thumb operating your smartphone.

      想讓世界知道你在做什麼其實不是什麼大錯，但是當你機械的把你的生活張貼到網上時，你變得不再像是一個活生生的人，反而像一塊稜鏡，把周遭的光影反射到“雲端”，同其他人的光影放在一起。你變成了操作手機的手指。

      The key thing to remember is that you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focussed on making them look attractive to other people. Your experience of something, even if similar to the experience of many others, is unique and cannot be reproduced within the constraints of social media. So internalise that experience instead. Think about it. Go home and think about it some more. Write about it in more than 140 characters; on paper even. Paint a picture of it. Talk about it face to face with your friends. Talk about how it made you feel.

      需要記住的是，當你把體驗分享到網上時，它們並沒有變得更好；相反，你會更容易受到干擾，因為你把更多的精力花在怎樣潤色它們，以給他人更好的印象。你對於某件事物的體驗可能與其他人的相似，但它更應該是獨特而不可複製的。所以，學著內化你的體驗。寫點超過140個字元的文章描述你的體驗(甚至用真實的紙筆)。畫一幅畫描繪你的體驗。跟你的朋友面對面談論你的體驗，說說它給你帶來的感覺。

      Once you stop seeing things through the eyes of the people following you on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram you become able to make experiences your own. You can relieve yourself of the burden of having to make everyone aware of what you’re doing at all times. You can make your experiences significant because you were there and you saw the sights and smelled the smells and heard the sounds, not because you snapped a photo of it through a half-inch camera lens built into your phone.

      當你不再用社交網路上關注者的視角來看待事物時，這些體驗才真正變成你自己的。你解脫了自己，不再有不必要的負擔，別掛心別人知不知道你在幹什麼。你可以讓你的體驗變得更有意義，因為是你自己本人，是你看到了那些畫面，聽到了那些聲音，聞到了那些氣味，而不是因為透過手機裡半英寸不到的鏡頭拍下了照片。