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?
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.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/28/17054848/smartphones-photos-memory-research-psychology-attention
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.