I went to the Zoo recently and I couldn’t believe how many people immediately whip out their phones to film the animals in the exhibit.
Like, if looking at images of animals on your phone was anywhere near as enjoyable as seeing them in person, why even pay to come to the fucking zoo!?
The animal you are looking at is already existing within a dead facsimile of its actual environment! It’s already like looking at an image!
Do people really go back and look at these images and videos and feel the same feeling as when they’re looking a marmoset of exotic bird right in the eyes a few feet away from them?
It feels like we’ve all become trained to whip out our phones and start filming the moment anything interesting starts happening. The way everyone prefers this mediated experience to just being in reality experiencing art or living things or a concert or whatever just makes me feel kind of bleak. To me this is a great example of what is meant when we talk about Alienation.
Anyone else agree or am I being a grumpy geriatric shaking my fist at the kids on my lawn?
A counter perspective I guess: As a person who doesn’t take photos or appear in photos (I think there are fewer than ten photos of me in existence, at various ages), I’ve sometimes thought about how devastating it would be to my sense of self if I lose my memory when I get older and don’t have any sort of artifact (like a photo) I can use to bring any of it back.
I still don’t take pictures though, it’s just not a habit I’ve formed.
Same probably a dozen photos that I’m not just in the background of, I just forget stuff and sometimes something else reminds me. I think it reconnects a lot of other neural pathways sometimes, I don’t know how it is looking at old photos all the time to compare.