Click-O-Clique

 Click-O-Clique

From the click of a Kodak to the swipe of a smartphone, cameras have always shaped how we see and share our lives. They hold nostalgia in family albums, mark milestones like graduations and weddings, and today, help transform everyday moments into content. Alongside this, consumerism adds its sparkle to new gadgets, trends, and aesthetics that invite us to experiment and express ourselves. But with endless scrolling comes aesthetic burnout, a reminder to pause and appreciate the uncurated beauty beyond the feed. Click-o-Clique traces this journey of the camera, how it captures not just what we live, but how we remember and present it. It also explores how the camera, from film to phone, shapes not just what we remember but how we perform and belong in a culture built around the click. The sub-themes for the following theme are-

SUB-THEMES

Nostalgia: A Kodak Moment?

When we think of nostalgia, we often return to the early 2000s slap bands on our wrists and those living-room “fashion shows” where we tried on every new outfit while our parents clicked away on their SONY or Kodak cameras. Those photographs weren’t just pixels; they were tangible keepsakes, preserved within the fat weight of a photo album on your lap, prints with creased corners passed around the dinner table, each one holding a story. Today, digicams are making a comeback to snap trendy, aesthetic shots in cafés and at parties. Yet, as Eric Hobsbawm reminds us with his idea of “invented nostalgia,” sometimes what we long for isn’t the past itself but a carefully crafted version of it, a past that feels real because of how it’s preserved, displayed, and remembered.

Milestones

From blowing out the candles on your fifth birthday to walking across the graduation stage, milestones have always marked our arrival at “what’s next.” Once, they were anchored in printed wedding invitations, anniversary scrapbooks, handwritten letters tucked into drawers. Today, they aren’t just lived, they’re clicked. Engagement rings sparkle first on stories, career wins get LinkedIn announcements, and even the “soft launch” of a relationship gets its own carefully framed shot. The click has become the seal of recognition measured not only by the memory they hold but by the audience they reach. And perhaps, as Erving Goffman would say through his idea of dramaturgy, these clicks are part of our “performance” curated front-stage moments presented for an audience, while the unposted, unfiltered realities remain in the backstage of our private lives.

When Your Life Becomes Content.

When Your Life Becomes Content is where it begins. FOMO culture hums like background static, urging us toward the Instagrammable and Pinterest-y looks we’re told to recreate. The café culture chronicles keep weekends neatly packaged: the phone eats first, latte art lined up in curated corners, sunsets softened by warm filters. In the ‘attention economy’, every post is currency proof of being there, proof of being someone. A “day in my life” clip erases the messy bits, replacing them with an aspirational reel that says, "I was here, and I was happy” whether or not both were true. What we gain in likes and validation becomes ‘social capital’, traded not just for visibility but for belonging.

Consumerism

Consumerism sits beneath it all shopping as self-soothing, the carousel of trends spinning too quickly to step off. Skincare rituals, body ideals, haul videos it’s always just one more thing, one more look, one more promise of becoming your “best self.” But behind the glitter lies the ‘commodification of culture’ itself, where styles, practices, even identities are packaged, sold, and recycled for mass appeal. Here, identity is not only lived it’s bought, styled, and performed. 

Aesthetic Burnout

Aesthetic Burnout creeps in when the feed starts to feel like a loop the thrill fades, and the pressure to “keep up” overshadows joy. What once felt creative turns into labor, leaving us in a state of ‘alienation’: present in moments, yet disconnected, watching ourselves perform rather than live. In this exhaustion, we glimpse what ‘Debord’ called the ‘society of the spectacle’- a world where appearances take precedence over reality, and life is staged more than it is lived. Out of that fatigue grows a craving for the uncurated: light falling unevenly through leaves, a stray cat on a college campus, a laugh unposed. Moments that happen once, and never online.

Click o Clique doesn’t take sides, it isn't here to scold or to glorify. And maybe the point isn’t to pick one side of the coin, but to flip it over from time to time, to remind ourselves that some of the best moments live both in the feed and in memory, and a few are special simply because they belong only to us.