The diffusion of multi-task mobile telephones, the “smartphones,” offers new opportunities and enforces the user dependency upon them.
We talked of them in a former article : “The Third World”.
As an attempt to describe the state of permanent pseudo-alienation the user finds himself or herself projected into, I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to the smartphone ability to take pictures, correct, and immediately share the just-acquired visual information.
If we wanted to make an easy comparison, we would remind ourselves of the songs we have listened to only about twenty years ago.
The reproduction—and the listening—were all but easy and immediate, enabling a longer duration of the “product.”
Today, pictures are made, shared, and reproduced with a shocking easiness: their consumption increases and their “half-life” is annihilated.
The event is recorded during its evolution.
Pictures no longer constitute a “memory.”
They are instead an [independent] absolute reality.
They are a reality because the recording restrains the attention within the camera range of action.
They are absolute because we are living the ongoing event only through the picture channel.
This fact prevents people from appreciating the surrounding reality through all their natural senses.
Memory coincides and is limited to the photographic cliche, which can be retouched, corrected, or faked, according to the author’s taste or mood.
We are at step 1 of alienation.
In an attempt to immortalize the moment, the user accepts he’s not fully living it.
He or she has thus lived an event that is already different, as having been incomplete.
The correction of the photographic cliche, regardless of any artistic interest, constitutes a further weakening of that portion of reality recorded into the image.
We are at step 2 of alienation: the alienation of memory.
Because the image is, at the same time, lived experience and memory, any alterations or processes weaken its connection with reality, in the medium and long term.
Immediate image sharing upsets the emotional process, because it draws the subject’s attention towards the individual receiver’s reaction.
Now, we are at step 3.
The communication is incomplete, sometimes narcissistic, and smartphone-dependent.
You have all lived a day, an encounter, a life, a picture!
We should have powerful memory and immense emotion.
However, we refuse to live a poor, fugacious instant.
We are left with hundreds of pictures and no memory at all.
These thoughts should be the starting point for a personal reflection.