Shawn Blanc wrote this piece. I loved it! The core issue with photography is actually not immediate sharing. There’s not a fundamental need to share a moment as soon as possible unless your’e a journalist. The core issue with cameras (disconnected) and smartphones (connected) is that mediums that are in place allow us to feel loved. Feeling accepted is a huge part of our lives. The feeling of being alone affects people who are literally alone either by choice or not. Like Tom Hanks and his friend Wilson, having someone to accept you, your actions, your thoughts and your life is hugely important to our well-being and sense of worth:
Shawn writes:
And I want to share these photographs with people. I am proud of them and I enjoy looking at them, and I want others to see them and appreciate them as well. But unless one of my Flickr images makes it onto Explore (which has happened twice), I get very little feedback or activity.On Flickr I have 885 contacts following me. On Instagram I have 2,235. Yet my Instagram photos get far more than just 2.5 times the activity than my Flickr photos.
There is a way around this. There are a lot of photographers who utilize Photo Stream (iOS/Mac Only). You edit photos and import them into iPhoto and then wait a few minutes for the photos to appear on their phone. Some photographers even crop their pictures to 4×3 in Lightroom before putting them in iPhoto to make sure they can post to Instagram in exactly the crop they chose since Instagram doesn’t support portrait / landscape photos.
With this method, you can receive the gratification while still sharing quality images.
This only works if you have the time to carry out this task and if you care very little about sharing moments as they happen. The fact that most people don’t have the time to carry a camera around leads me to believe even fewer are willing to crop their photos and transfer to their phone for sharing on Instagram.
When is the last time you went to a friend’s Flickr account or Imgur profile or even their homepage and clicked the “gallery” button. Does anyone outside of professional photographers even maintain online galleries anymore?
The problem with placing photos on places that people have to visit out of their way is that people will never visit. If I have to consciously decide to visit a person’s Flickr page, chances are, I’m not going to do it. If I’m posting photos to Instagram and see a stream of photos that I can just scroll, that’s far easier or if I’m on Facebook to talk to friends and see someone just posted some vacation pictures, I’ll click.
To have engagement, you have to first have eyeballs.
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The counter to Shaun’s argument though is that he could simply stop caring. If you stop giving a crap what people think about the crap you do in your life, you can live a much happier existence. It took me too long to realize this but it’s the reason I’m slowly backing out of social media. I blog and that’s it. I don’t need your retweet, like or comment to be happy. I don’t look at click throughs of my blog posts and weigh in on my blog title being “sticky” enough.
If you can get over the need to be validated, you’ll realize that the best way to capture memories for YOU is a dedicated camera and you’ll do that because it’s the best way to save memories and when you don’t need likes, life is much simpler.