Last month, the Oxford Dictionary Online invited the words "buzzworthy" and "selfie" "off the street and into their database," recognizing the permanence of our cultural obsession with the fleeting. We want to talk about what everyone else is talking about right now, but we rarely dig deep to find out what's really going on. When traveling or celebrating, rather than living in the moment and finding our flow, we capture a two-dimensional representation of the present to present to others.
The always brilliant Maria Popova points out that Susan Sontag’s thoughts on photography (published in 1977) help shed light on the "psychology and social dynamics of visual culture online."
We fill our social media timelines with images, as if to prove that our biological timelines — our very lives — are filled with notable moments, which also remind us that they are all inevitably fleeting towards the end point of that timeline: mortality itself. And so the photographic image becomes an affirmation of our very existence, one whose power is invariably addictive:
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.
[…]
It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
I'm not entirely comfortable with Sontag's assertions about the violence of photography, but it is incredible how relevant her words are today, more than thirty years later. Now, more than ever, photographs seem to have become "a way of certifying experience," as well as "a way of refusing it — by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir."
After all that, don't you want to follow me on Instagram?