小說家馬隆．詹姆斯成長於1970年代的牙買加，意味他的童年記憶是政治動盪、文化豐富的一段時期。成年後，他的心思不斷繞著那些時光和地點打轉，試圖將當時僅依稀意會的事物合理化。

Out of that quest comes his third novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” which begins as the optimistic glow of independence is giving way to the harsh realities of Cold War politics and the rise of gangs connected to the country’s two main political parties. Crack cocaine appears and the gangs go international, setting up operations in Miami and New York.

這項尋覓讓他出版第三本小說《七血案簡史》。開始時獨立的樂觀氛圍正為殘酷的現實所取代：冷戰政治的殘酷現實，與兩大政黨掛的黑幫崛起。快克古柯鹼出現，黑幫國際化，在邁阿密、紐約建立巢穴。

“The idea for this book is the very first I had, even before the other two novels, because I always was interested in writing about the Jamaica I grew up in,” Mr. James said. “I thought it was going to be a short novel, that it was one person’s story. But I was wrong, because history is always shaping everything.”

詹姆斯說：「這本書的概念是我寫書的第一個想法，比另兩本小說早，我一直有意寫出我成長的牙買加。因為是一個人的故事，我以為會是短篇小說。但我錯了，因為歷史一直在形塑一切。」

At 43, Mr. James is part of a new generation of Caribbean writers whose main cultural reference, aside from their home countries, is the United States rather than their former colonial power (in Jamaica’s case, Britain).

43歲的詹姆斯屬新世代加勒比海作家，他們主要文化背景除了母國就是美國，而非前殖民國（以牙買加為例，是英國）。

Mr. James calls himself a “post-postcolonial writer” with a hybrid intellectual background. So while he read Shakespeare and Henry Fielding in school, he noted, he also listened to Michael Jackson ; his novel makes references to Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing.”

詹姆斯自稱「後殖民作家」，擁有混合的知識背景。他說，他在校既讀莎士比亞和亨利．費爾丁，也聽麥可傑克森；他在小說中提及澳洲歌手安迪吉布的《影舞》。

“Our sense of what it means to be a real Caribbean person is much more expansive, fluid and complicated” than that of earlier generations, said Nicholas Laughlin, a Trinidadian writer and critic . “Marlon is a writer who not only makes a mess of those boundaries and definitions, he totally obliterates them. ”

千里達作家兼評論家勞克林說，和先前世代相較，「我們感覺中的真正加勒比海人更廣闊、更流動、更複雜」，「馬隆這作家不僅把疆界和定義打亂，甚且完全抹去」。

The plot of “Seven Killings” revolves around the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in December 1976 . Marley is called simply the Singer in the novel, Mr. James said, because his persona risked overwhelming the novel, which is just under 700 pages.

《七血案簡史》情節以1976年12月暗殺鮑伯．馬利未遂案為主軸。詹姆斯說，書中僅簡稱馬利為「歌手」，唯恐他的光環蓋過小說，這本書接近700頁。

“I needed him more to hover over the book, as opposed to being in the middle of it,” he explained. He said he found a solution when he read Gay Talese’s Esquire magazine article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which focuses on the circle around that singer. Another help was Roberto Bolano’s novel “The Savage Detectives,” which Mr. James described as “a very conscious template.”

他解釋說：「我要他盤旋書的上方，而非置身書中。」他說他在閱讀《君子》雜誌塔利斯的文章〈法蘭克辛納屈感冒了〉時，找到解決方法，全文隨著環繞這位歌手的一個圈子打轉。另一助力是波拉尼歐的小說《野蠻偵探》，詹姆斯說這本書是「很有意識感的一個模板」。

Characters based on real-life people, including Cuban exiles and their C.I.A. handlers, play central roles in the novel. Jamaican politicians like the rival former prime ministers Michael Manley and Edward Seaga are very much present, too, along with leaders of the “garrisons,” the communities and criminal militias that their parties controlled.

小說的中心人物真有其人，包括古巴流亡人士和中情局的處理者。牙買加的政治人物，如兩位對立的前總理曼利和席加也躍然紙上，另外還有「衛戍部隊」的領導人、社區、受制於政黨的犯罪民兵。

Mr. James warns, though, that “if you are going to read this as history, you’re bound to be disappointed and confounded.” A lot of the novel, he said, is “just me being a trickster.”

儘管如此，詹姆斯警告說，「拿它當歷史書閱讀，定會感到失望和困惑」。他說，小說的很多部分，「僅是我在造假」。

But he does remember overhearing as a child some of the stories he incorporates into the novel. His mother was a police detective and his father a police officer who became a lawyer, “so the world of crime and politics and disturbances was always around,” he said .

但他植入小說中的故事，有些他記得兒時確實聽人談起。他的母親是刑警，父親先是警官，後來改當律師。他說：「犯罪、政治、騷動的世界一直在我身邊。」

A few years ago, Mr. James said, a European interviewer began a question to him with “as someone who escaped the ghetto. …” He remembers objecting: “I grew up in the suburbs, like every other kid in every other part of the world. We had two cars, and we argued about things like ‘Is “T. J. Hooker” better than “Starsky & Hutch?” ’ ”

詹姆斯說，幾年前，一名歐洲訪問者以「身為逃離貧民窟的人…」為開場白向他提問，他記得反駁說：「我在郊區長大，和所有這個世界其他角落的每一小孩一樣。我們有兩輛車。我們也會為『《胡克警探》和《警網雙雄》那部比較好看這種事爭辯。』」

9月18日，捷藍航空1416號班機從加州長堤前往德州奧斯汀，剛起飛數分鐘。坐在5A座位的威爾許聽到一個可疑聲響。他說，不久後煙霧瀰漫機艙，空氣差到只能看得到前面幾排座位。他很快就發現這架空中巴士A320飛機右舷的引擎爆炸了。

As other passengers began to cry, and pray, he strapped on his oxygen mask and pondered his fate. “I understood that I might be going to meet God,” Mr. Welch, 34, recalled. He thought, “If this is my time, this is my time.”

其他乘客開始哭泣祈禱，威爾許戴上氧氣面罩思索命運。34歲的他回想：「我想可能要去見上帝了。如果命該如此，就認命唄。」

Faced with his own mortality, he could have closed his eyes in quiet reflection. Instead, Mr. Welch, a sports photographer, responded in a distinctly 2014 manner: He reached for his Samsung Galaxy Note 3 smartphone, thrust it into the murky air and pressed the record button. He even found the presence of mind to record a smiling selfie.

面臨死亡，他大可閉目靜靜回顧人生。身為運動攝影師的威爾許卻做出2014年式的反應：拿出三星Galaxy Note 3智慧手機，高舉至煙霧瀰漫的空氣中，按下錄影鍵。他甚至有心情自拍笑容。

Never mind that the plane landed safely , making the mechanical failure a relative nonevent. The pulse-quickening, you-are-there footage captured by Mr. Welch and other passengers helped propel the story to national news. Mr. Welch’s two brief videos, meanwhile, went viral; one attracted more than one million views.

總之飛機安全著陸，機械故障未釀意外。威爾許與其他乘客拍的令人脈搏加速、彷彿身歷其境的影片上了全國新聞。威爾許拍的兩支短片皆在網路瘋傳，其中一支觀看人次破百萬。

It is no longer enough to record seemingly every moment of life with your smartphone, it seems. Near death is fair game, too.

用智慧手機記錄生活的每一刻似乎不夠，瀕死也是不錯的題材。

Thanks to the Personal Video Industrial Complex — tens of millions of video-enabled smartphones, feeding countless hours daily to video-sharing behemoths like YouTube — rock concerts, presidential inaugurations, school plays and even midair near disasters can all be considered “content” now, inspiring us all to record the event for posterity.

拜「個人影片產業集合體」之賜，數以千萬計用智慧手機拍的影片，每天餵養YouTube這類影音分享巨獸，搖滾演唱會、總統就職、學校舞台劇，甚至險些發生的空難，現在都可視為「內容」，讓我們樂得拍下供後代觀賞。

But even as publ ic gatherings, from the world-historical to the intimate, evolve into a sea of glowing blue screens, a backlash has started to take root. An assortment of critics — mindfulness gurus, twee indie rockers, even, seemingly, Pope Francis — have started to implore these armchair videographers to drop their phones and start living again.

但就在公開場合活動，從歷史性全球事件到私人活動，都走進一片藍色螢幕海之際，反彈卻也出現了。各領域的批評家：心靈導師、獨立搖滾音樂人、甚至好像包括天主教教宗方濟各，都開始苦勸這些脫離現實的攝影家們，放下手機，重新開始過生活。

To live the moment or record the moment? It’s become a defining issue of the iPhone age.

要活在當下或是記錄這一刻？這已成為iPhone時代的關鍵性問題。

“Is it more important that we actually live these experiences than obsessively record and upload them to the cloud?” asked William Powers, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and author of “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.” “Absolutely. Will most people therefore learn to be more in-themoment and swear off excessive pictures and videos? I doubt it.”

麻省理工學院媒體實驗室科學家、《哈姆雷特也愛瘋：數位書房的哲學家》一書作者鮑爾斯問道：「我們親身體會一個經驗，是否比著魔似地將它錄影並上傳到雲端重要？當然。至於多數人是否因此學會享受當下，戒掉狂拍照片和影片？我懷疑。」

For news obsessives, such talk might conjure images of the viral Vatican shots after Pope Francis’s election in 2013. The images, posted to social media by NBC News, purported to show a contrast between the relatively phone-free crowd in St. Peter’s Square that greeted Pope Benedict XVI’s election in 2005 and the thousand-points-of-smartphonelight that greeted Pope Francis .

對於新聞迷，這番談話令人想起2013年梵蒂岡選出新教宗方濟各時，傳遍全球的照片。由國家廣播公司上傳至社群網站的照片，顯示2005年本篤十六世當選教宗時，擠滿聖伯多祿廣場的群眾手上看不到什麼手機；歡迎教宗方濟各時，廣場上有數千個手機光點。

True, the story turned out to be a bit more complicated. As The Washington Post later reported, the “before” shot was actually from the funeral procession of Pope John Paul II, a setting where smartphone use would seem inappropriate. Even so, the “after” shot proved indelible, perhaps even to the pontiff himself.

實情更複雜些。華盛頓郵報之後報導，號稱2005年教宗選舉的照片，其實攝於教宗若望保祿二世的喪禮，那種場合使用手機本就不宜。儘管如此，2013年的照片卻是如假包換，對教宗本人而言或許亦然。

As with any discussion involving social media, it’s easy to write off the phenomenon as a pandemic of narcissism. We live in a culture, after all, that can support a Tumblr called Selfies at Funerals, filled with precisely that.

在所有關於社群媒體的討論中，常輕易把這種現象解釋為自戀流行病。畢竟我們生活在這樣的文化中，在Tumblr加上「喪禮自拍」的主題亦無不可。

Academics have made that connection. A 2013 study by Jean W. Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, and two colleagues, looked at more than 760,000 American books published between 1960 and 2008. It found that first-person plural pronouns (“we,” “us”) declined by 10 percent, while first-person singular pronouns (“I,” “me”) increased 42 percent. To Professor Twenge, an author of a 2009 book called “The Narcissism Epidemic,” this is part of the same societal shift. “That’s what video is: It’s my experience,” Professor Twenge said.

學界建立了這樣的連結。聖地牙哥州立大學心理學教授珍．特蘭吉和兩位同事2013年所作研究，檢視超過76萬冊1960至2008年間出版的美國書籍，發現使用第一人稱複數代名詞（我們）者減少10%，而使用第一人稱單數代名詞（我）者增加了42%。身為2009年書籍《自戀流行病》作者，特蘭吉認為這是社會變遷的一部分。她說：「影片的意義就是：這是我的經驗。」

She might get little debate from Mr. Welch, the JetBlue chronicler .

她和捷藍航空事件記錄者威爾許的看法若合符節。

“I sound hypocritical because of what I did,” Mr. Welch said, but he said he finds the widespread obsession to upload to the web every random moment in life “a little extreme.” Still, he realizes that there are reasons beyond vanity to reach for your phone .

威爾許說：「我做過的事或許讓我聽起來有些假道學。」不過他覺得著魔似地上傳各種生活片段到網路「有點極端」。然而他認為拿起手機錄影除了虛榮之外還有其他原因。

“I was considering the fact that my family might not see me again,” he said. “After I started filming, that’s why I turned it on myself.” He added: “I wanted my family to see me smile.”

他說：「當時我想，家人可能再見不到我了，所以開始錄影後我才會把鏡頭朝向自己。我要家人看到我微笑的樣子。」