The hard work of happy snaps
Where there’s a smartphone, says Glenda Cooper, there’s a photo to be shot, filtered, hashtagged, shared and liked by all your friends ...
IN 1710, Bishop George Berkeley first raised a key philosophical question: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does 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 happen?
Not if you look at the average Facebook and Twitter pages. Indeed, Professor Cary Cooper, a psychologist based at Lancaster University, thinks people are spending so much time taking photos, posting them online and commenting on them while on holiday that they can’t relax and disconnect from everyday life.
The truth is that we no longer wake up and smell the coffee. Instead, we spot the coffee shop, buy a latte, snap it on our smartphone, put the best Instagram filter on it, hashtag it, post it via Facebook and Twitter and anxiously wait for people to “like” it. By which time, the coffee’s cold.
As a PhD researcher who investigates user-generated content (ie words and pictures created by ordinary people), I’m intrigued by Cooper’s conclusions. As a person who is always armed with a smartphone, I can only guiltily hold up my hand (oh, and snap a selfie).
I’m far from the only person living life through a lens. Take one friend who bagged 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 a 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.
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 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, in which one in three admitted 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 they were secretly posting Photoshopped pics of Paradise from a bedsit in Bognor.
Then again, I believe many of my friends who say it’s not one-upmanship they are thinking about with these snaps; it’s about creating beautiful memories for their children.
For those born into a world of digital cameras, it’s hard to understand the misery endured by those growing up in a world of film. Then, all you ever had were three decent snaps of your holiday — 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 shots. — © The Daily Telegraph