Pixelated Memories: The Costs of Living Through Phone Cameras
Pixelated Memories: The Costs of Living Through Phone Cameras
Ever thought of why, when you want to forget something or someone, you think that deleting the pictures on your phone will do the trick? Has the phone now become our memory storage box?
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the snapshot has been the archetypal readymade image: placeholder for memories, trophy of sightseeing, produced in their millions by ordinary people to document the rituals of everyday life.
Quick researches on cameras tell us that they were made for persevering memories and to create permanent and accurate records of life. The need to capture just that one shot in the sea of memories and experiences made these pictures mean something. Then, with the start of a new century, came the built-in cameras in the phones. Now, the ability to arrest a moment in time has become commonplace. Yes, we can click again and again just to get that one perfect picture, but we have lost the art of appreciating just a picture that may not be beautiful but was captured in relevance to the love felt and offered by the photographer. This has been another change that has me reflecting a little and left me feeling a little sad- cameras needs someone to help, something that shows community and character because of the way different people capture things they deem timeless. Now, the picture is so polished that all of them look as if they have come out of the same auto body shop.
Smartphone photography is reshaping the way we store and recall memories, in ways we do not even realise until it's too late. The sensory detail that we retain in an experience reduces and alters the moment, and as this happens more and more– we stop paying attention to the moment itself and rather get more invested in capturing it. Sociologist Linda Hekel actually attests that because of the need to rely on an external aid for memory, we are indeed compromising our memories, ultimately subconsciously loosening our hold on the details and the textures of the memories. "As soon as you hit 'click' on that camera, it's as if you've outsourced your memory," she says.
Counting on these external aids to remember for us, we do not partake in the mental cognitive processes that help us to actually remember all of the moments on our own. Psychologists call this process of relying on external tools instead of our own memory (this seems awfully familiar in the current times ) “cognitive offloading.” Lots of studies show that when people know the information is retrievable, they are more likely to forget it. This attentional dissengagement has made us lazy and averse to actually focusing and remembering things for anything in life. Well, I guess that is why we don't really remember all of our friends' smartphone numbers and their addresses, isn't it?
Photographs have been advertised as though they are memories, the ones that we look back upon while we are sitting in the high and mighty future and scroll through to reminisce fondly about and chuckle. However, we forget that they are stagnant. Memories are always changing- because you are the person taking the picture or posing in front of the camera and you will change and so will the way you see life, the perspectives, the ideas, the emotions, the meaning. Memory is so much more dynamic than a picture captured and still in time. Cameras can never record experiences like our brains do. In fact, some of the most beautiful experiences can’t be captured in phone cameras—watching the sunset. You might have the photos on your phone of the big slob of orange smack in the middle of the screen but it doesn’t capture the warmth of it.
This reminds me of the artist, Penelope Ombrico, who collected all photos of the sun that have been taken and posted on Flickr and said, “I thought it peculiar that the sun, the quintessential giver of life and warmth, constant in our lives, symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things unreachable and ephemeral, omnipotent provider of optimism and vitamin D… and so ubiquitously photographed, is now subsumed to the internet – this warm singular object made multiple in the electronic space of the web, and viewed within the cool light of the screen.”
541,795 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial) 1/23/06, 2006
It is not the photo that should be considered important anyways, it's what the photo conveys and what it means– which we are undeniably losing slowly. We are deliberately, whether we want to admit it or not, not even seeing photographs as memories we want to keep anymore, but moments we want to dish out. Do we even remember how we were feeling in that one photo we look really good in? We now feel the joy of a perfect view but don't stop to consider the feelings we reckoned with while taking the perfect photo. We are losing our emotions to a sleek and slim body of aluminum, glass and plastic. It makes the photographing more about finding and posting what is worth capturing, recording and uploading. Not what one actually wants to capture, what elicits a genuine emotional response.
In the current times, this is more harmful than ever as we see words, ideas, art being fed into AI and coming out ‘refined’. This has become the normal way of life—everything is put through the blender that is artificial intelligence. And out comes the garbled up, no emotions, no feelings, no humanity smoothie. It has been happening to us for a long, long time with these photographs. We lose ourselves to this external, seemingly inevitable, entity that makes things easier for us and in return asks us to be less than we are, less than we should be capable of.
Humans have been capable of reciting ballads and poems that are more than 10 pages, of capturing a person in the portrait only seen once, of learning by heart the landline numbers of hundreds of relatives with the help of memory alone. Did you know that sixty percent of our brain is made up of fat, making it the fattiest organ in our body? Well, what are we letting it store? Because now if we want to remember what fats and carbohydrates we had at the trending restaurant we went to with our friends two days ago, we have to pull up our phones and sometimes even open Instagram stories.
A picture from my gallery. Funnily enough I do not remember what I ate that day. Was the dessert a cheesecake or a pancake? I do remember laughing with my friends though.
In 2025, humanity will take approximately 2.1 trillion photos. This is the first time we will reach that number in a year. In comparison, 1.9 trillion photos were taken in 2024 worldwide. Globally, we capture 5.3 billion photos daily, or 61,400 per second. Photography used to be about preserving memories, however now, much of it revolves around sharing. The numbers are final and out there. People post nearly 5 billion items to Facebook, 1.3 billion photos on Instagram, and 12 years' worth of video to YouTube every day. Research shows that taking photos for social media alters our perspective on past events. Instead of recalling an experience from our own eyes, we start seeing it as if we were an observer, like a scene from a movie rather than a personal moment. It plays for us as if we are on the sidelines and not actually in it.
There's more or less a shift in the purpose of taking these photographs and capturing these moments— it goes from doing it for our own sentimental and permanent record to doing it for the performance and trying to fit an aesthetic, it goes from being just a photo to being a social photo. Nathan Jurgensen in his book The Social Photo notes that “To the degree it’s ephemeral, the social photo does the opposite: it interrupts the traditional photographic mode of fixing the present as impending history, positing instead a captured moment that is indifferent to such recording.”
There's also the pressure of picturing and posting on social media to show others that we have apparently done something, to show that ‘oh, my day was worth it’, there was some stimulating activity included in the 24hrs we performed. Ahem, lived. This not only increases the insecurity of various kinds but also creates a hyper individualist society that facilitates confrontation and is constantly in competition with each other. It's so easy to compare lives when all of them are on display for us. Vulnerability and timidity takes root in all of us as we start separating from each other and connecting to a machine.
There is something darkly amusing in the mass hysteria that took place when people realised their archive stories and highlights on Instagram were getting deleted, especially because they did not have those in the storage anymore. Well, better forget those moments now because we are not getting them back. Concerns about system failures, the anxiety associated with the fragility of our digital personas, and the information we refer to as “ours” raises the question: is it truly ours? This apprehension connects to a larger worry about the erosion of self-reliance and the perceived control humanity has long attempted to exert over its reality, now influenced by technology.
Nam June Paik’s 1994 sculpture “Internet Dream.”
Our identity is made up of all the experiences we have ever had, and these are accessed through our memories. They are the reservoir we refer to when we think of our life. The constant documentation for the world and not ourselves changes our perception of who we are. We distort our own selves, our identities, our past. These photographed events may show us the moon, but we shadow over the memories and details present in the craters. We detach ourselves from the precious and important echoes of our lives just for the sake of curating ‘stories’ and sharing them with the hundreds of people we know.
Some memories are as vivid as the day. However, most memories feel hazy around the edges. We use photographs to try to fill the gaps. This raises considerable concerns on how we actually remember. Do we actually fill in the moments of the past or see the photos and try to interpret them and thus present them in the way your current and future self will want? Are we staying faithful to these memories? Is there somewhere an act of curation happening, simply because we have the possibility to make our past fit our current views? We are not just preserving memories now. We have started to make them and shape them.
What will you do if a mass malfunction of phones and clouds takes place? If all of these precious photographs go missing? Will you remember what you did on your birthday? Will you remember which painting in the museum caught your eye? Will you remember what you had when you were with your best friends? Will you remember what books you read at your favourite spot? Will you remember what graffiti you found radicalising? Will you remember the color your favourite room was? Will you remember the people who were with you on the best and worst days of your life? Will you remember? And if you won't, who will you blame?
We think that us humans are susceptible to time passing by. Scared to be forgotten and to forget. We try to hold onto things that don't want the claw marks on them. We try to experience everything and let people know we have experienced everything. Thus, we created this tool to help us remember, because we do not want to miss anything, and don't want to throw it away. But do we possess the courage to forget, something that is so human?
Morestalgia, a "modernized" nostalgia for the Internet age, a saturation of memories not from the past but from immersive web navigation. 1- Riccardo Benassi, 'Morestalgia', Fondazione ICA, Milan, 2023.
Well, these phone cameras surely see and store more than us—after all, we have two eyes and they have a number of lenses. So, it becomes all the more urgent to make the most of the moment and remember. Take photos. Let them supplement your memories, not own them.
But perhaps we should also learn to let some moments ‘slip away’. Let them go uncaptured in this small device. Be here, in the now of your life, in the particular moment and take a screenshot of the warmth and the love in your mind and body. The photograph is not the reflection of the experiences you have lived through, you are. Remember that.
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