A few years ago I unexpectedly lost most of my childhood photos that my mom had taken on her first iPhone and I was devastated. As you can imagine, this was a lot of photos (the average person has 2,795 photos on their phone). But I learned that I do not need nearly as many photos as I thought I did to remember my life.
As smartphones became popular and made it easier to take and share photos people have started to overdocument things. This habit of constantly taking pictures and videos spawned the online phrase “phone eats first,” a reminder to take a picture of your meal before you eat to immortalize it in your camera roll. But what good are these digital leftovers? You certainly can’t reheat them.
I’m sure many of us have witnessed this behavior at concerts, when you look into the crowd and there is a sea of phones. Or when you travel to a popular place and people spend more time with their nose in their phone instead of enjoying the view. Even just a slightly pink sky is enough for people to pause and snap a picture. The average American takes six photos a day.
The argument for taking a lot of photos is that they help us to remember a moment better and even relive it. But research shows that taking too many photos actually has the opposite effect — it actually makes us less likely to remember things due to the photo-taking-impairment effect.
When you take a photo you are trying to produce something, whether consciously or not, and that adds pressure which reduces your ability to relax and enjoy the moment. Your brain also gets interrupted from processing what it is seeing in front of you. You become distracted by adjusting the screen in front of you and engage less of your other senses like smell and hearing which contribute to memory-making.
Recording things also allows the phone to remember for you, a form of cognitive offloading. You give your brain permission to forget and free up space, trusting that digital evidence will trigger the memory. I still remember what some of the photos I lost looked like, but absolutely nothing about the moment or day they were taken in.
Russell Banks, an American poet and writer sums it up well when he wrote that taking pictures when traveling is “to reduce and domesticate (his) experience and ultimately to kill it.”
When I took a school trip to Iceland in high school, my teacher told us he would confiscate our phones if he caught us looking at them instead of our surroundings. At the time I thought he was being too strict and showing his age by denying the benefits of technology. But now I realize that he was trying to make the experience better and more memorable for us. The pictures I do have from Iceland I rarely look back on because the memory of actually being at the waterfalls or glaciers is crisper and more satisfying.
Too often I see people my age staring into their phone screen. They are motivated not only by the desire to remember but also to share their experience on social media. Instagram “photo dumps” have become hugely popular wherein users post a series of up to 15 photos to share experiences over a period of time. This is another reason people, particularly Generation Z, feel motivated to take a lot of photos.
But a lack of attention to surroundings and focus on a device can have deadly consequences. There were 259 deaths related to taking selfies from 2011 to 2017, per the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care.
I’m not saying to stop taking photos, but be mindful of your surroundings and put the camera down in order to be present in the moment. We were not meant to experience the world through the lens of a camera or a device’s screen.
