On holidays? Then unplug already!
Persistent photo-posting leaves little time for relaxation
In 1710, Bishop George Berkeley first raised the genesis of what was to become a key philosophical question: If a tree fell in the forest and nobody was around to hear it, did it make a sound? Three centuries on, it’s more relevant than ever: If we’re on the beach and there’s no one there with a smartphone to Instagram it, did our holiday ever exist?
Not if you take a look at the average Facebook and Twitter pages.
Indeed, Professor Cary Cooper, a psychologist based at Lancaster University, has warned that people are spending so much time taking photographs, posting them online and commenting on them while on holiday that they can’t relax and disconnect from everyday life.
In fact, they may not even be able to enjoy spending time with the friends and family they are away with, so distracted are they by online activity.
The truth is that we no longer wake up and smell the coffee. Instead, we spot the coffee shop, buy a double-shot latte, snap it on our smartphone, put the best Instagram filter on it, hashtag it #coffee, post it via Facebook and Twitter and anxiously wait for people to “like” it. By which time, the coffee’s probably gone cold.
As a PhD researcher who investigates user-generated content (or, in the real world, words and pictures created by ordinary people), I’m intrigued by Cooper’s conclusions.
As a private individual who is always armed with a smartphone, I can only guiltily hold up my hand (oh, and snap a selfie).
There are currently 3,049 photographs on my iPhone — few, if any, of which will ever make it to an old-fashioned photo album. Instead, they’ll languish on a computer or my long-suffering friends and relations will be subjected to them via social media.
Yet I’m far from the only person living life through a lens.
Take one friend who got prized tickets to the London Olympics — once there, she was so busy trying to get great photos, she missed paying attention to the actual events.
While on safari, another friend met an American who declared, as the group finally saw an elusive leopard, “Why do you think I came to Africa? To photograph the Big Five.”
So, er, not to see them then? (“Mind you,” my friend later admitted, “he was the only one who got a picture of it and we all begged him for a copy.”)
I’ve grown used to wedding photos popping up so quickly on Facebook that the bride has scarcely had time to say “I do,” and to live tweets from the labour ward.
And many parents think nothing of snapping every moment of their offspring’s lives.
In fact, at my daughter’s endof-term ballet show this year, I noticed a sinister new development — iPads being waved at the stage to capture each moment. How appalling, I thought; I could hardly push my smartphone through the gaps to capture my own child’s wobbly moment of glory closely enough.
The worst thing, of course, is the constant need for validation that all of this creates. If you doubt me, try forgetting to “like” a new baby picture; it’s the digital era equivalent of sending yourself to Coventry.
And Cooper adds that there can be a competitive edge to this sharing — particularly when it comes to those holiday snaps.
“It’s about telling other people where you are and using it to show off,” he says. His warnings are backed up by a study of 2,000 holidaymakers by the Post Office, which found that more than one in three people admit that they stage holiday photos for social networking websites to try to appear as happy as possible.
Indeed, there are a few people I follow online who seem to have such incredibly fabulous lives that I once wondered (even hoped) if — perhaps, on dark days — they were secretly posting photoshopped pictures of Paradise from a bedsit in Bognor.
But then again, I believe many of my friends who claim that it isn’t one-upmanship they are thinking about when accumulating snaps — rather, they are creating beautiful memories for their children.
For those born into a world of digital cameras, it’s hard to understand the misery endured by the rest of us who grew up in a world of film.
Then, all you ever had were three decent photographs of your holiday in north Wales — and you were wearing a scowl and a pink ra-ra skirt in all of them.
So cut us persistent snappers a bit of slack, and be grateful when my perfect holiday shot comes your way. At least you won’t have been subjected to the 3,048 practice attempts.