The social pressure to SHARE

If you were born before 2000 you probably have a place in your home where memories are packed into folders and tucked away for safe keeping. Before social media photos were almost sacred things, protected and treasured and kept for a lifetime. A photo was a risk, an attempt to capture a moment and an uncertainty of success until the film was developed.

I have a lot of memories tucked away like this. Moments that have never been posted to the internet and only shared with family and close friends. But I have them and even though they spend the vast majority of time in darkness, slowly completing a chemical process that degrades them and makes the colors fade, I have them and they are special.

Those memories contain people who are no longer with us, chance encounters, old friends lost along the path life has taken me. I was never under social pressure to show these pictures to everyone before social media. The social competition was limited to a much smaller group of people and not everyone in the world.

Then digital photography expanded and social media evolved. Captured memories became ephemeral and could be lost more easily. On MySpace I had hundreds of photos shared with friends who were there and showed off to friends who were not. Those MySpace photos are almost all gone, lost to a failure to backup an abandoned account on a platform that no longer exists.

This is a pattern inherent in the system. When Facebook took off the pressure to share increased. More and more friends, family, acquaintances, and the expanded social circle of friends of friends and groups all full of people sharing moments and creating a need to share your own moments so as not to be invisible.

Today, the ephemeral nature of captured moments has reached an extreme. Photos are taken, shared, forgotten. Millions of lives documented in the moment, without structure, and without a thought of saving that moment to share with the future. It is assumed that anything posted online will be there forever.

When I die, my albums of memories will be passed on to a world that will not value them. My kid may keep them around for a while but in the long run, they will last longer than the hundreds of thousands of digital photos I have taken. Some of those digital photos may languish in the deep storage of some websites for a long time, lost to the short memory of social media.

Now extend this trend to EVERYTHING. Video, writing, art, music, computer programs... everything is losing long term value to an ephemeral mindset driven by social media and digital saturation. The sale of ephemeral experiences has become a huge chunk of the economy. Music, movies, TV shows, and other entertainment are sold as digital files locked behind a service that will eventually fail when money starts to slow down.

I don't have a point here, just a rant that I have run out of steam on. Buy physical media, spend a little more to have something you can hold in your hand. Enjoy the moment, you don't need 50 crappy photos of an evening out, its not a guessing game any more.