"Overly Documented Life" analysis

In A.J. Jacobs “The Overly Documented Life” he tries another experiment, recording every day so he can look back at every moment and fact check himself. Similar to his “Unitasker” chapter in The Guinea Pig Diaries he chose to write little headers, so he can emphasize some of the steps to the audience. Overall used the dinner conversation method that we talked about in class. That means that he writes mainly informally for entertainment, adding jokes here and there to grab the audience’s attention. While still incorporating a decent chunk of facts, so the reader can understand the experiment better. Some examples are the google glasses and the Bell method. That is the main method that he used to do his experiment. After doing his experiment for a while he realized how he changed psychologically at first, he stopped doing things like peeing in the sink because he did not want to see the recording. Quickly he figured out that it did not really matter and continued doing it. It was pretty interesting how he compared that to reality TV programs. I do think a lot of those shows the people get so used to the cameras that they start acting like themselves again. All to go with his overall theme that life does not need to be recorded. Although it seemed like a good idea it tends to make life more boring because people guard themselves when they see that they are being recorded. Most times it is better to just live in the moment and interpret events the way with think they went. This is something that I completely agree with because I have always felt that experiences are better than pictures and videos, even though those can be nice too. It addresses another major issue that many people have including himself, which is privacy. As I mentioned before many people feel uncomfortable being recorded, when he found out that his post from his mood app was public he was enraged. As many others were when he told them that he was filming them.