Happy snapper

It was an interesting question. Why do people these days tend to view things through a secondary medium such as a smartphone camera. They go to an event but watch much of the event staring at the screen of their phone whilst recording. Where does this urge to capture the moment come from and why.
I have always taken pictures. Friends and places I have visited, I would snap away as if the scene or the event would disintegrate if I didn't. The urge to stop the bus as it were and hold onto the moment is part of it. 

Photography is addictive especially when there was so much in taking a photo, not like today where it is simply point and shoot and the camera does the rest. Way back then you measured the light with a separate metre, you measured the distance with another gadget (or in both case you used your experience and guessed) you adjusted the speed, you adjusted the aperture, you estimated the depth of field to compose the picture and then if the subject hadn't skedaddled you pressed the button.
Apart from the art form of creative photography, which I am sure isn't in the minds of most of the people taking the pictures, why do they do it ?
I remember lugging a huge Video camera, (the type that a normal sized VCR tape fitted into the camera), around the UK and America back in 1987. 
I was obsessed with capturing everything of our extended holiday. The kids were of an age when everything was new but probably a little was taken in. But I captured that holiday to a tee and I can still watch with great pleasure the trip to Yorkshire, Norwich to visit friends, Cornwall, London and our visit to America also to stay with Marie's Family, visit Disney, Washington and finally New York. I was laughed at and sometimes derided for having the camera on my shoulder (it was so big and heavy I stressed my neck muscles) but the obsession to capture the moment was so strong. I have loverly creative moments, both indoors and outside, of the family, mine and the larger family.  A special moment when we the older ones were not cursed with aches and pains and the younger ones were totally natural, playing out their childhood.
In Washington I would get up at at 6.00am and sneak out of the hotel so I could wander freely amongst the monuments and buildings of State. I would return to the hotel just as they were waking up, feeling very satisfied with myself of the footage I had captured, able as it were to close that particular chapter of the trip. I can well imagine the Director of a "shoot" doing a film when he has at last captured what's in his mind of a scene and the story it told.
Perhaps that's it. We are trying to tell a story, we are trying to impart what it means to us behind the camera immersed as we are in the larger picture, hoping that others will be as interested as we are, saving for posterity that very special event which if portrayed properly is watcher-able for a whole array of reasons not just those that were in our minds when we went out filming.