Are Digital Photographs Too Plentiful to Be Meaningful? Essay Sample
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Are Digital Photographs Too Plentiful to Be Meaningful?
The notion of capturing a moment is really one of the great developments of the past two centuries. Time moves on insistently stopping for no one, but there is something amazing about the idea of being able to capture a likeness that is real in space and time and preserving that image unaltered far into the future. As technology drags us into the future, and digital photographs are more plentiful and accessible, they become less meaningful.
We as humans ascribe value to what is rare and take what is plentiful and easily accessible for granted. The singular photo possessed by a person at the beginning of the 20th century will have more meaning, because, obtaining a photograph was a chore. We are aware of how photos were taken in the early years, how time-consuming it was to develop the film, and how often things went wrong (Wortham,2016). The modern person who can take color photos just by clicking a camera icon on their smart device has no such patience for the journey others in the past took for 1 black and white photo.
We are inexorably being pulled into a future where everything physical is being digitized. Convenience replaces contact, and the tangible becomes a hyperlink (Lupton). It is telling that whenever a disaster such as a fire or a flood would destroy a person’s home it was the loss of physical family photographs that were prominently lamented as opposed to any digital photos stored on multiple platforms. You feel the loss more succinctly when you can never hold or see those images again.
There is nothing inherently wrong with digital photography, on the contrary, it is a wonderful convenience that gives us the ability to take a photo virtually any time and place we want and is an expectation of life in the 21st century. However, in light of social media platforms, digital photos have been used endlessly to document everything from the mundane to the inane as people post photos of everything from pets to gourmet dishes eaten (Wortham,2016). The custody of those endless digital photos is entrusted to the internet because we never can envision a world where there is no internet, or even electricity (Doncaster). This stands in stark contrast to film photographs which are kept physically by the person who took the photograph and are only shared with their consent.
The meaningfulness of an object to a person is expressed in how they protect it. It would be ludicrous to assume that a parent would hand out photographs of their children to strangers in Times Square, but we often have no problem flooding the internet with personal or family digital photos (Lupton). We trust the computer and the internet to protect and keep our digital photographs safe as opposed to our homes where we physically live and interact (Doncas,). The speed, convenience, and abundance with which digital photos can be taken in our everyday lives are belied by the fact that we unintentionally regard it as a cheap commodity that requires a fraction of the labor once required to produce photographs. This in turn leads us to entrust impersonal forces such as the internet or electricity to preserve this readily available commodity and rendering it meaningless in an ocean of excess.
Work Cited
Doncaster, Melanie. "Are Printed Photographs Always Better than Digital?” Photo Contest Insider. 28 January 2016.
Lupton, Deborah. "The Politics of Privacy in the Digital Age". Web Blog Post. This Sociological Life, 2014
Wortham Jenna. "Film Photography’s Revival in a Digital World.” New York Times 31 May 2012
