f you saw someone in distress, needing urgent help, what would you do? You’d hold out your hand, of course – but would it be to start filming them with the phone that you’re clutching?

Surely not. But, incredibly, that’s what appears to have happened last week in Telford, when a man took his own life in a multi-storey car park. West Mercia police say they are still investigating whether witnesses goaded the man, 42-year-old Ian Lam, before his death, and shockingly, whether others also recorded his last moments on their mobiles.

There is still some debate about how many people were involved – it seems to have been a small group rather than a mob – but nearly 10,000 people have signed an online petition urging police to take action.

The thought of taunting someone at the moment they most need support is an appalling one – although it is not as unusual as we might like to believe, says psychologist Dr Susan Marchant-Haycox. Research into crowd behaviour, she says, has shown that the relative anonymity of being part of a crowd, and the distance from the person involved, can result in “deindividuation” (losing self-awareness and individual accountability), leading to this sort of inhumane behaviour.

But the particularly disturbing development in the Telford case is how the mob’s actions turned a man’s death in to a medieval-style spectacle.

How did we become so removed from compassion that we see no difference between filming our children taking their first steps, and a man taking his own life?

The case of Ian Lam, you see, is not a one-off. When the Sydney siege was under way last December, bystanders took selfies outside the Lindt café and shared them on social networking sites; one even used the hashtag #hostagesituationselfie.

Here in the UK, back in 2012, when a woman died in Manchester after being hit by a lorry, passers-by stopped to take pictures and post them on Twitter.

It is a grim footnote that half of the victims of Japan’s Mount Ontake eruption at the end of last year were found clutching a mobile telephone or camera in their hand, with their last recordings being of the erupting volcano and ash cloud.

Of course, there is an enormous amount to celebrate in the ease with which we can connect and catalogue what is going on around us using technology; many important news stories have been broken in this way. And yet our ability to capture the moment with a mere swipe and a click is separating us from what really matters.

Maryanne Garry, a researcher in New Zealand, found that taking endless pictures has had an adverse effect on our memories because we are unable to live “in the moment”.

Academics from Connecticut have discovered in their studies that phone photos prevent us from forming memories properly in the first place; it’s obvious, really, if you continually whip out your phone to capture an event, as the researchers concluded, you miss out on what is happening right in front of you. The distancing effect applies also to social networks where it’s easy for outrage to be whipped up, and for trolls to descend into personal abuse in a way that they would never do “in real life”.

We have become like the tricoteuses who sat knitting under the guillotine (picture, left), or those who went to Bedlam to watch the mentally ill for their own amusement. Reports of the last public hanging in Britain – that of Michael Barrett in 1868 – tell of the crowd indulging in comic songs and dances before giving a great cheer as the gallows was put up; how far is that from a group of teenagers snapping shots of the grimmest of events to see how many “likes” and retweets they can get?

The old cliché has it that Native Americans and Aborigines refused to be photographed because they believed that cameras stole part of their soul.

Looking at our world today in which it’s deemed perfectly OK to film a man at the moment of his death or take a selfie while a gunman holds people hostage, isn’t it possible the old tribes were on to something? If you have been affected by anything in this article, the Samaritans are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for anyone who needs to speak to someone in confidence by calling 08457 909 090 or visiting samaritans.org