a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  3477 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Tragic Data Behind Selfie Fatalities

    What do people in that age bracket actually HAVE that they can take pictures of?

Their food, duh.

IN ALL FAIRNESS

The tales you tell of photography are not wrong. My first camera was a Zenit APK, which took 35, scratched UFOs across landscapes with its shitty Soviet shutter, took batteries that were not available this side of the Iron Curtain and did an awful lot to thwart my photographic abilities for 10 or more years. You had to be serious about a photo of something to take it with the Zenit.

But that world is dead.

These days, a phone is a piece of shit if it doesn't have two cameras and a person is a piece of shit if he doesn't have a phone. That 110 your mother dragged along on vacations is a wretched anachronism compared to anything available today and the level of automation available guarantees that pretty much anyone with a thumb can get a pretty good picture of pretty much anything, any time, anywhere. So in this brave new world, where 98% of your schedule is repetitive and 99% of your surroundings are mundane, what changes? What warrants documentation?

I mean, I have no set schedule and I lead a fairly adventuresome life and probably 40% of my photos these days are my wife or my kid. And I have a wife. And I have a kid.

I don't think it's narcissism. I think it's the same mediated experience as always, only with much cheaper mediation. The people who take a lot of selfies wouldn't have taken anything back when it meant 35 cents a shot, plus a tripod, plus a shutter release.