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Kiss cam awkwardness or avoidance isn't anything new. After all, the folks behind the cameras don't always know if two people are a romantic couple. It's guesswork, which has sometimes led to people who are just friends or, in some cases, related, to stiffly show some kind of affection that isn't kissing. However, this couple at the Coldplay show was swaying to the music, the man standing behind the woman with his arms wrapped around her. So, the camera operators were making a good bet this was a couple. Regardless of any other strange interactions in the history of the kiss cam, this would appear to be the first documented time anyone has looked that afraid and immediately gone into a duck-and-cover drill.

It didn't help when Coldplay frontman Chris Martin saw the incident and remarked to the entire audience, "Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy. I'm not quite sure."  

Martin's first guess appeared to be correct. The man was the CEO of an artificial intelligence company and the woman was the company's head of human resources. They've both since resigned. 

Of course, thousands of smartphones captured the incident, and it spread all over social media, quickly becoming a nationwide reference point that was memed to death and even recreated by two Philadelphia Phillies mascots at a recent game. The whole thing was, frankly, hilarious to just about everyone in the United States (except the two people involved and, likely their friends and family) and there aren't many things that fall into that category these days.

As the laughter has died down, though, the event has sparked some questions about just how much everyone's life is, for better or worse, documented in one way or another. Smartphones are everywhere. So are surveillance and security cameras. Thanks to social media, most Americans willingly put out more information about their lives than anyone would've imagined even 20 years ago. 

Interestingly, this has already had an impact on younger generations who have never lived in a time when there's not a good chance they're on a video or in a photo somewhere, even unwittingly in the background of something snapped by a total stranger. 

Over the weekend, on the NPR program "It's Been a Minute," how the fear of doing something embarrassing that will go viral on the internet has caused many Americans under the Gen Z label (those born between 1997 and 2012) to be extremely self-aware in public to the point of near neurosis. Wagner said it's common for many young people to avoid dancing in clubs (where dancing is often the point), at weddings or any public event where a slip up could, in theory, make them a laughingstock for life.

Some see younger generations as obsessed with image. It's likely few have stopped to consider it might be more of a survival tactic than a product of vanity. 

Long before smartphones or Instagram, societal norms enforced certain rules of acceptable behavior. It's a survival instinct that can be linked back to humanity's primal days in caves. Everyone had to pull their weight and live a certain way just to make it from one day to the next. Guilt, embarrassment, anger and similar emotions are all byproducts of the hardwired brain meant to enforce tribal unity. 

Even in more modern times, there was -- and remains -- a sense of conventional wisdom around what is deemed incorrect, shameful or embarrassing behavior. Given that, someone could easily reason that, if a couple doesn't want to be caught having an affair, maybe that couple shouldn't attend a concert with 55,000 other people at a football stadium in Boston (or maybe don't have an affair at all). 

Fair enough. 

But what about when a video a kid's grandmother took of him playing with a toy lightsaber accidentally gets uploaded to social media and the kid gets relentlessly bullied and made fun of not just by people he knows, but millions of strangers? That's a real thing that happened to a kid about 20 years ago, and the video has nearly 40 million views on YouTube. What about an embarrassing accident that happens to be captured? 

It's worth asking what the surveillance (willing, incidental, sinister or otherwise) of nearly every detail of everyone's life is doing to people. So far, like just about everything else the digital age has wrought, it seems to be making people more isolated and less joyous.