Social media snapshots: an end to personalized memorizes

We are glued to our smartphones, no doubt about it. High schoolers and adults alike, we all feel naked without them. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it can help people keep in touch, hold our calendars and alarms and even store our memories all in a palm-sized device. However, when people begin to prioritize using a smartphone over human interaction, especially among friends, it turns into a distraction of the worst kind. With the rise of social media and the convenience of iPhone cameras, it has become second nature for people to snap and share photos of all that they do in a day. How many times at a cafe have you seen food arrive at a table only to see the entire party whip out their smartphones like it’s a Western duel to capture their pristine order? Are they really going to look back and reminisce over the third time they ordered that overpriced piece of avocado toast? Rarely do we look back over old photos to keep detailed memories fresh in our mind. They serve more as a timeline than a keepsake. Social media snapshots have become a force of habit for many of us to preserve casual memories. It is a bandwagon mentality to perpetuate a constant cycle of conforming to what the rest of the group is doing in a moment; if we are not participating, we often feel left out. Yet for the amount we all visually capture our memories, we are hard pressed to truly remember the details of them afterwards. This is because these thoughtless snapshots can be summed up in one word: lazy. By relying on our phones to preserve our lives, we lose out on the whole, unfiltered (no pun intended) experience that we sought in the first place. Mindless picture taking causes us to separate from the event, resulting in worse recollection of it. Even worse, it distracts us from our friends and loved ones every time we scurry down the social media rabbit hole picking filters, captions and geotags so that we can share these events with a majority of acquaintances who do not really care.All of this is not to say that preserving and sharing memories through snapshots is bad, but we must temper our habits in order to prevent them from detracting from our experiences and digitizing them into impersonal, exaggerated highlight reels. As an independent event photographer and being the de facto picture taker for many of my friends, I can feel the distance between a subject and me when I have my camera held to my face. I am not seeing the whole scene and capturing the whole experience. I am confining my memory to a millimeter wide viewfinder. This is what happens when someone pulls out their phone at every turn to take a snapshot; they are confining themselves. So next time you are with friends, think twice before you pull out your phone to take a picture. Instead, give them your undivided attention and take in the moment as is.