Social Media Makes Us Lose the True Meaning of “Photography”
With Social Media, Photography Becomes Only Informative
Did you know that more than 50% of people who want to go on vacation look at photos on social networks to choose their vacation spot or to confirm their choice? Did you know that vacation photos are the ones that are most shared on these same social networks?
Most people who take pictures no longer do so to express themselves, translate emotions, or convey feelings.
They do it to inform or to show that they exist.
This is the great paradigm shift in photography. In the previous paragraph, I explained that to photograph is to tell your truth. With the network, photography becomes a way to inform and show that we exist. This is a radical change in the way we consider photography.
With the abusive and forced use of photography, the people who take pictures are no longer trying to express themselves, they are just documenting.
They relate information about the world around them or about themselves for money, products, promotions, etc.
The intense use of social media networks pushes people to document rather than to talk or exchange.
Is it good, is it bad? I do not have the answer to that question. The world is always changing. The photo too. It adapts to the modern world.
But personally, this is not my photographic approach. I am not concerned. I am someone who thinks in the long term. I like timelessness. Fortunately, we are all different. I like what has meaning, what has a body. I like to transmit in any form. This way of photographing for social networks does not have this dimension of timelessness. This is what I will explain to you.
With Social Media, Photography Is Not Attached to the Photographic Sense
To give meaning to a photograph is to tell a message that a human being can understand, grasp, and interpret.
A meaningful photo allows the viewer to reflect, think, escape, understand, analyze, and judge. When a photo has meaning, a viewer spends time looking at it. The meaning of a photo gives it a direction for its understanding and analysis.
When we give meaning to a photo, we translate an emotion, we transmit a message, and we show what we find beautiful.
Most photos on social networks are informative. They are meant to inform about a specific moment or about the person taking an image. These photos are only meant to keep you informed of events.
They do not focus on the deeper meaning. They do not seek to make people think or to provoke analysis. It is just information.
With Social Networks, Photography Is Reduced to Proof of Existence
Most of the photos posted on social networks have a purpose. They prove that we exist. We do this by showing the events we participate in. I use the word 'we' on purpose. Photography allows us to integrate everyone – you and me.
The photos we post have become factual evidence that we exist, because we are participating in an event. We validate our lives in the eyes of others. We make public our life and all our acts.
This is, in my opinion, a terrible mistake for several reasons.
First, other people do not care about us and what we do. Everyone thinks only of themselves. We always think of our own comfort and interests. We think of ourselves first. When we have some time left, we think about others. That is the way human beings are. If you study Maslow's pyramid, you will see that this truth, even if it is not good to hear, is the only one that prevails.
So, by publishing pictures of us and our existence, we are pleasing ourselves. No one else is interested in us. The few likes we get will be obtained just to please us. They do not reflect the authors' thoughts.
Another reason that makes me say that these photos published on social networks are useless is their truly short lifetime.
On average, people look at our photos for 2 seconds. Then they look at the next picture. Our photos are quickly forgotten. They are only snapshots of our lives. These photos are called emographs. This word is obtained with the beginning of the word emotion and the end of the word photography. It sums up perfectly this new way of communication.
Photographing for Social Media Makes Photos Commonplace
As a professional photographer, I often take marketing and personal development courses.
One of the things I learned is that we tend to want to copy or be like the five people we are most in contact with. That is why you must choose your friends and your professional circle carefully.
Social networks only illustrate this fact. When you look at the photos of people you follow, you end up copying them or wanting to look like them. Eventually, all the photos, whether yours or others, are almost identical. The explanation is simple. You want to belong to the group. We are social animals. We live with others. We want to fit in.
But in the end, by trying to be part of the tribe, we lose our identity and our differences. We become satisfied with the average instead of striving for excellence.
If our friends on social networks show us evidence of their existence, we will imitate them telling ourselves that this is the way to do it. We choose to partake in this circle of mimicry.
Social networks have this ability and power to lower the photographic level because everything is so similar.
The photos become banal.
Our Loneliness Creates an Urgency for Low-Quality Photos
I cannot count the number of photos posted on social networks where people show an airport, their train ticket, where they are sitting in a waiting room, the restaurant where they are having dinner, or the dish they are eating.
These are absolutely useless photos which bring nothing to the debate and are made with an urgent desire to post something to remind our followers that we exist. We have to show who we are and what we do as a justification for our existence.
And all these acts are done at the expense of photographic quality. The compositions and the framing are non-existent. What to say about the meaning of the photos which evoke the nothingness, the interstellar void.
It is certain that these people communicate, that they need to fill the void of their existence somehow.
They have forgotten that photography is a means of expression. When you express yourself, you communicate. But we have to say something. As I said in a previous paragraph, we are witnessing the emergence of a new means of communication: emography.
What saddens me the most is that this virus is spreading to more and more people. I know many professional photographers who have it.
I even met one who ruined part of a trip for me because there was no internet connection. He could not post his thirty daily photos on his favorite social network; thus, he made the rest of us miserable.
I even met a professional photographer who threw a tantrum that I will always remember. We could not go out because of the weather. The storm lasted 2 days, therefore, he could not post on social media for 2 days. What a disaster! The world still has not recovered from his tantrum.
Social networks create a state of emergency which in and of itself creates simplistic photos, because they are made without thinking about them, without construction, without giving them any meaning. They are made just to show that we exist.