On Friday I went along to TEDx Liverpool (#TEDxlp). TED’s slogan is ‘ideas worth spreading’ and this pretty much sums it up. TED stands for ‘technology’, ‘education’ and ‘design’ but the themes covered are much broader. The TEDx events are independently organised and tend to be a mixture of video footage and live talks. Over the years many noteworthy speakers have shared their ideas including Tim Berners-Lee, Bono, Richard Branson, Bill Clinton and a whole raft of others.

The theme of Friday’s event was creativity and it was fascinating. There was everything from future technology, how schools kill creativity, to social journalism and a nifty device called Arduino, which could potentially enable you to track your cat.  I have to admit that the next few minutes were lost to me as I weighed up the possibilities of this last suggestion.  It was a thought provoking event and a great way to spend a Friday afternoon.

I took a lot of ideas away with me but one thing has haunted me all weekend. Take a look at the video above. Have you watched it? I do this. Not to this extent of course. Not the kiss and the riding precariously on a motorbike but other things. I check my phone almost obsessively. And I don’t even like mobile phones. I never have. I have a landline at work and one at home. If you can’t get me on those then I’m out. Leave me a message and I’ll phone you later. Less than a dozen people have my mobile phone number and that’s just fine with me. No, what I’m doing when I’m ‘checking’ my phone is reading email, my Twitter feed and blog posts.

Sometimes in the evenings I look up and Lord Levy has been staring at his phone and I have been staring at mine. Or one or both of us have laptops out. Just sometimes I think, “Hello, I’m really here you know. Why don’t we have a real conversation?”

The other night we were talking about going on holiday later in the year. I wasn’t thinking about the view from the balcony or all the new places we could discover. No. I was thinking, “I wonder whether they have wireless access so I can take my laptop and blog and upload pictures.” I was wondering whether my iPhone would work in Italy.

I’m not one of those people who has to share their life online. I’m really not. In fact, I’m quite a private person. What is shared here is only selective information. I think about writing a lot. Wherever I am, I think about how I can blog this experience or how it would fit into a story. But I do worry that at times it goes a little bit too far. I wonder whether other bloggers feel this? Is our enjoyment now felt through publishing the event, rather than through experiencing the event itself? Being in the moment and conveying immediacy is one thing but are we contriving situations to try and tailor them to our writing? If so, isn’t it all a bit fake?

Wordsworth described his writing as ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. This suggests that whatever event triggered his inspiration was written later when he had the chance to do it justice. It also suggests (I hope) that he enjoyed the daffodils and the subjects of his poetry. Perhaps it is truly experiencing something that brings about good writing.

So tonight I’m switching the devices off. The phones, the computers, the laptops. But only after I’ve tweeted this post.