The oversharing of vacation photos

As our friends can attest, we're happy to email you photos of the big events in our lives.

But even that's relatively rare.

One of the interesting things about social media is that it interferes with the experience while you're having the experience.

You're not looking at the waterfall, you're lining up the selfie of the waterfall.

It mediates the very thing it purports to share.

 

If you spend 10 minutes at the waterfall, you can take a selfie there and still have 9 minutes and 55 seconds of “experiencing” the waterfall.

 

Ooh, MC is not gonna like this post!

 

Did people never take pictures of themselves at waterfalls before social media was invented? I feel like I’ve seen old pictures of people at waterfalls.

 

"I'm standing in the surf talking to you on my cell phone!"

- Daytona beachgoer, 1996

 

They did. On our honeymoon, my wife and I clashed at times because I didn’t like to stop to take pictures.

 

Stop what we were doing out in public, I mean. Minds out of the gutter.

 

She should have known you were in the zone.

 

Too late.

 

Last year, I went back to a waterfall around which I spent a good deal of my formative years. It invokes many, many memories, both good and bad.

First thing I did when I got there was take a selfie with my wife and kids in front of it, because they’d never seen it. Then I texted that selfie to two of my best friends.

All of that took about 30 seconds. Then, I “experienced” the waterfall for, like, 20 minutes while my kids climbed on all the same rocks and walked the same paths I did.

 

Hang on, I gotta Periscope this.

 

I think what you are talking about here is quite different than what others of us are talking about when we say that we worry people are missing out on experiences in deference to photo-snapping.

I take photos. Most people here probably take photos. My parents took photos. Their parents took photos.

None of us turned every afternoon at the beach into a two-hour photo shoot.