I went to the Zoo recently and I couldn’t believe how many people immediately whip out their phones to film the animals in the exhibit.
Like, if looking at images of animals on your phone was anywhere near as enjoyable as seeing them in person, why even pay to come to the fucking zoo!?
The animal you are looking at is already existing within a dead facsimile of its actual environment! It’s already like looking at an image!
Do people really go back and look at these images and videos and feel the same feeling as when they’re looking a marmoset of exotic bird right in the eyes a few feet away from them?
It feels like we’ve all become trained to whip out our phones and start filming the moment anything interesting starts happening. The way everyone prefers this mediated experience to just being in reality experiencing art or living things or a concert or whatever just makes me feel kind of bleak. To me this is a great example of what is meant when we talk about Alienation.
Anyone else agree or am I being a grumpy geriatric shaking my fist at the kids on my lawn?
Your post doesn’t mention the “I want to share it with my friends” psychology
Fair point but it still feels like it’s the willingness to remove yourself from the present experience in favor of sharing a cheap and unimpressive facsimile with some theoretical other person that weirds me out
Once we replace our eyes with cameras we can have the best of both worlds!
And for only $99.99/mo they won’t take away your ability to see. A great deal!
I suppose. I would like to take a picture of an animal making a funny face, send it to a friend (“this is u”), and put the phone back on my pocket.
I’ve always agreed, but I’m in my 30s and have never understood the appeal of social media. I will say I do occasionally enjoy watching other people’s concert footage because there are some artists that I’d genuinely like to follow from stop to stop like a deadhead or a phish stan, but obviously can’t in this economy lol.
Not to belabor the point, I just wanted to post something tangential I think about: I believe a few candids of interesting-but-not-that-interesting moments can score a critical hit in 20-30 years. One of them will hit like the food inspector in Ratatouille. The voice of a friend who’s not around for one reason or another, a place that used to be common, some hobby you’ve dropped, or a moment when you were giggling can flip your life upside down for a second. I took excruciating notes every night while I was abroad just in case one day I want to relive it.
Yeah, I often get into depressive moods and will go through a journal or photos of me and my family as a kid. Makes things feel better sometimes.
Yeah this is a great point well said
I hate weddings because they lack this. Everything is so fucking sterile and artificial and perfectly posed. I get it for the major wedding photos, but why aren’t there photos of the kids doing dumb shit, the couple sharing an intimate moment away from the crowds, or some other goofy thing happening? I find almost no value in the photos they give me where I’m standing in some crowd for 20 minutes while the photographer finds the perfect angle and lighting lol. It’s usually the photos where I’m making some goofy face chowing down food or some other shit, but people rarely document that unless they’re young, and even then they’ll only share it with you if you’re close lol
Very weird, all my favorite wedding pics are candid shots from the reception.
I never see them whenever the couple sends me the album. It’s usually all the professionally staged shots, or maybe when people are dancing and whatnot, but I don’t know, it still seems very sterile and usually includes the ‘important’ people and not randoms
nah, im in my mid-20s and have always felt the same way. all the boomers and gen x i know are obsessed with capturing every moment on film. me and my gf both never take pictures and my mom and her mom both always ask for pics when we do something and we usually have almost nothing. we went on a week long vacation halfway across the country and when we sent the pics to them there were like 15 and some of them where the same pic at different angles.
i think it just takes you out of the moment. if i want to remember it ill just use my head. if i forget, it wasn’t important anyways. ill take pictures very sparingly bc they are nice to look back on but having too many would discourage me from looking at them and obscure the truly important moments. even in important moments ill take just a few pics bc i want to stay in the moment
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While I feel pretty much exactly the same I have softened on it a little. A family member admitted to me that she does this when I brought it up once, and when I mentioned the point you make about making memories she just said to me “your memory is way better than mine.”
She probably isn’t gonna look at those photos and nobody else is gonna look but I kinda decided that people are allowed to cling to their experiences in the face of entropy however they like. (Tbh I will still probably be rolling my eyes at this behavior but, like, compassionately somehow.)
Bit of a chicken or the egg thing. There’s evidence to suggest that constantly taking photos actively limits our ability to remember the moment.
Your cousin may be locked into a cycle of behavior where they’ve not trained the neural pathways for the mindful presentness required to make good memories, and now doesn’t know how to, so they’re stuck in a loop of continuing to use photos instead.
That’s fair to bring up, I do agree and would probably be in a similar boat as her if I didn’t write often, that kind of thinking is supposed to be good for memory. But of course whenever I lose a pet, for instance, I always find myself wishing I’d taken more pictures of them.
That specific example really hits for me too, but my cat who passed last year I actually did take a lot of pictures of (because she absolutely captured my heart and I couldn’t resist), and something that I realized going through them is that there were only really 7-8 good ones worth keeping after the better part of a decade of companionship. But those were the photos of when she first followed me home, or when she was curled up in her favorite spot which just so happened to be a well decorated corner of my apartment, or when she was happily looking out a window during road trips (she actually liked car rides!)
I like photography as an art form and do occasionally make a real effort at taking a good photo, but that kind of practice takes more effort and mindfulness too. The photos worth keeping were the ones I applied myself for, not the dozens or hundreds of stupid selfies or poorly shot loaf pics, as much as I loved her and her loafing.
Same. I totally understand taking a few pictures for later so you can reminisce a bit about the stuff you did, but folks have an obsession with “I need to setup the perfect 6 photographs of my weekend to show everyone on Instagram” and I think that specifically is extremely unhealthy
I’d say it’s a little of both.
People of all ages are certainly conditioned to record and photograph every little thing out of the ordinary, which takes away from being present. Phones in general are incredibly distracting from taking you out of the moment.
It’s also incredible technology the ability to capture any photo/video at any time. There’s no real tangible loss of taking too many pictures ie you aren’t wasting any film/money.
Photos/video are really just a way to remember the past. People in the 90s would record pretty benign stuff too with camcorders and cameras, just the tech was more expensive and not readily affordable and available like it is today.
Also the zoo in particular brings out the nature photographer larp. Documenting nature in the wild takes an incredible amount of skill, luck, and patience. At the zoo you cut out all the hard work and get the instant gratification of shots which would be borderline impossible irl
Is anyone going to look back fondly on sleeping zoo animals or shaky concert footage? Prob not. I just think the conditioning of it is a way to help us remember the past, so at the end of the day it’s only mildly annoying at worst, and pretty harmless.
I think a better example of technology alienation is a couple/family all scrolling on their phones during dinner together.
I have looked back fondly on shaky concert footage
It’s been years since I last went to a concert and the reason is that standing in a crowd of people looking at the concert through their phones just felt weird and unpleasant.
The last concert I went to was Rush and everyone there was at least 50+ and I don’t recall much of anyone trying to record the set. They were to drunk/stoned anyway.
At some point I realized I never went back to look at that stuff, and since then it doesn’t make sense to me.
I do however feel the desire to create a physical archive of stuff though. It always slips away from me though. Thousands on thousands of photos /videos stuck in the proprietary cloud.
lol true. last time i went to a concert i took a 15 second video then was like “this sucks, im at seeing this great band in person, why am i staring at a screen” then i put the phone down and had a great time
I mostly agree, but there is some subtlety.
Taking pictures of an event or thing is pretty weird. But taking a few pictures of friends and family is great. Going to the zoo to take a picture of an animal is pretty silly, but getting a quick snap of my kids seeing a giraffe for the first time is pretty great. Same with taking a selfie with my friends at a concert. Obviously, I’m not spending a lot of time trying to set up an instagram perfect photo, just a quick candid here and there.
I love seeing them show up in various timeline apps and albums later and remembering the day.
In short, take quick pictures of your loved ones and then enjoy the moment.
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A counter perspective I guess: As a person who doesn’t take photos or appear in photos (I think there are fewer than ten photos of me in existence, at various ages), I’ve sometimes thought about how devastating it would be to my sense of self if I lose my memory when I get older and don’t have any sort of artifact (like a photo) I can use to bring any of it back.
I still don’t take pictures though, it’s just not a habit I’ve formed.
Same probably a dozen photos that I’m not just in the background of, I just forget stuff and sometimes something else reminds me. I think it reconnects a lot of other neural pathways sometimes, I don’t know how it is looking at old photos all the time to compare.
Do people really go back and look at these images and videos and feel the same feeling as when they’re looking a marmoset of exotic bird right in the eyes a few feet away from them?
No but I did go to a really sick zoo six months ago and I still go back and look at the pics and videos I took occasionally
My job actually depends on people taking as many photos of their life as possible so I’m directly contributing sorryyyyy
I never got into taking pictures for memories, I only take them to send to other people. I’m probably at the other end of the spectrum, but that is likely due to depression.
Will never understand the urge that roughly 1/4 of people who go to concerts have of whipping out and filming on their phones though. A picture I can understand.
My family, in general, hate being in pictures. But i do have one uncle who’s been into photograohy for his entire life. He documented all sorts of slice of life stuff that isn’t really captured all that well in video. Lived in Toronto during the 70s and Montreal in the 80s. Always found interesting scenes no matter where he was. His photobooks are just moments in time, but really captured what it was like. It’s one of those things that i do as well, to capture slices of life.
i’m also an old, though i’m the “young one” out of my most immediate family, not including my sibling’s kid who is like 12. when we all go to things, me and the kid are the one who actually look around at shit. the others, the boomers and the gen x, all have their phones out and are trying to frame the world around them onto their little handheld screens to take pictures and videos literally zero people will ever give a shit about, though maybe 8 people will click “like” on it when it goes by their feed, because it’s not an advertisement, a toxic-positivity affirmation, or an incoherent political screed blaming educated women and immigrants for problems.
i take pictures on vacation sometimes, but generally stuff that is just for me to remember a detail that would blur into the trip years later. the place in western new mexico i stopped to get gas that was 45°F on a summer morning. the brand new but absolutely shot-to-shit forest service trail sign leading back into town. little chronological markers. sometimes i take a picture of signage to remember the exact feature so i can look up info later.
it feels very different than, as you describe, the people walking around with their phones, watching the penguins through the camera hoping to capture some meme-worthy moment digitally while ignoring the rich analog happening around them. i can also tell you, my family for the most part does not go back and look through old photos. they do accumulate them on old laptops and ask for help migrating them over to new computers, with helpful names like “New Folder (3)”, “old phone”, “2010” and “Europe”. and as they age, they can’t really place where the pictures were taken in their own memory, because all they remember is focusing taking the picture… not their surroundings or the context. so there’s like a poorly framed picture of some building or a town that looks distinct and interesting, but nobody knows where or what it is. multiply that by 1000.
it’s a rare and talented person with incredible equipment who can get a really good photo of a feature or place that also conveys the energy, vibe, and emotion of those who behold it. and fortunately, those people exist, do that and sell photos online that can be framed, etc. not to mention, people paint and sculpt things to that can be souvenirs. and for going down a more informal memory lane, one can nearly always look up the place they went online and look at the tagged photos others have uploaded to be reminded. so all the individual camera wielding feels counter productive to memory making when there, in the present.
