How the smartphone has changed journalism and challenged our ideas of what counts as 'truth'

Are our endless acts of documenting affecting the way events play out?

We are all documentary makers now. Once upon a time, we watched events unfold around us, we experienced them in the moment: sometimes they faded from our memory, occasionally we could not shake what we had seen. We might write accounts, not always immediately, not always accurately. As for photos, well, who carries a camera wherever they go?

The answer, in 2018, is pretty much everyone. Technology has advanced so quickly that it is difficult to find a mobile phone which doesn’t double as a high-quality camera – and, indeed, treble as a top-of-the-range shooter of video. It’s a far cry from the oh-so-cool camcorders of the 1980s.

So it is that at music gigs, you are as likely to see fans filming their heroes as you are to see them just watching. Meanwhile, we learn that the reaction of many spectators to a women being felled by a wayward golf ball at the Ryder Cup was to take out their phones and to snap away. The victim of Brooks Koepka’s poor shot, Corine Remande, was left blind in one eye; those around her got images to last them – and perhaps their Instagram followers – a lifetime.