Paumgarten's Story Of A Man With A Gopro Analysis

Paumgarten’s story of a man with a GoPro accurately described how people think of their lives in today’s society. People are more focused on capturing a moment than living in a moment. A saying that I hear from my friends, “Pics or it didn’t’ happen” immediately came to mind after reading Paumgarten’s depiction of how our culture is changing.

Paumgarten talks about the professional mountain biker Aaron Chase. Chase is sponsored by GoPro to have the cameras mounted to his helmet, then he uses it so the company can use his footage for their advertisements. Chase recognizes that he had tons of great footage when he did not turn his cameras on this one day, but when he misses the herd of elk his only thought is, “There goes my commercial” (2).

People know that if they take a shot of themselves standing on top of the Golden Gate Bridge they’re going to have more likes than if they’re just standing in front of the bridge. In 2013, The New York Daily News published a story of a mystery man who climbed the bridge. The photos are incredible, but climbing atop the bridge is not permitted due to the history of over 1,600 people jumping off to commit suicide. Another instance of acting for publicity’s sake was the trend of the GoPro Fail. Paumgarten talks about his favorite failure being the video of the skier, Stefan Ager, who fell more than a thousand feet down a cliff. Ager’s video goes viral with more than three million hits. After the fact, Ager refuses to do interviews about the fall, saying, “I am glad that nothing happened and I can keep skiing.” (8) but the fact that the video was posted makes it seem like there was more purpose and less accident behind the fall.

When a stunt is captured leading up to someone’s death, the GoPro is described as being a, “kind of black box”(14). This was interesting since a black box is something in an airplane that is used to track the variables behind a flight. The black box comes into play when a plane crashes or if the plane goes missing it is useful to help track the location of the plane. When talking about cameras being a black box, Paumgarten is emphasising how people feel the need to record their every movement on the