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“All a kaleidoscope viewer had to do was put down the instrument of false beauty and look up at real beauty in nature.”
The first thing the Kaleidoscope article made me think of was people pulling out their cellphones at concerts. As playwright R.S. Dement said in the article, there is a certain degree of delusion to the beauty of the things we capture on our iPhones and mobile devices. Instead of capturing the live art that is being performed in front of them, people prefer to record for their own personal enjoyment.
Or are they?
Like kaleidoscopes, the things we post on social media are often nothing more than ephemeral status symbols. Why do we film Adele and not the guy strumming “Wonderwall” in the corner of a party? Why do we take pictures of garnished steak with a backdrop of lit candles and not McNuggets in the back of a 2004 Toyota Camry? Rarely will anyone go back through their camera roll and reminisce over the media that they capture because what they capture is for someone else. The sensation of being able to say “Yeah, I was there” is not to savor nostalgia but to inspire envy.
In a 2014 study, it revealed that people have poorer memories of what they capture on their phones in comparison to not using their phones at all.
Henkel asked participants to walk around a museum and engage some objects with their eyes and others with their cameras. When asked to photograph an entire object, people didn’t remember it as well later on, creating what Henkel termed the “photo-taking impairment effect.
By using other devices to record what is in our lives, it ironically deteriorates the authenticity of our memories. Whether it be kaleidoscopes or iPhones, colorful tinted glass or Instagram filters, people are stripping down natural life in preference of an artificial aesthetic. This raises the question: Will social media reach a point where the new trend is raw, unfiltered content or will artificiality begin to dictate our memories?
Sources:
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1220-taking-photos-at-shows-is-messing-with-your-memories/
Posted from our fascination by Tony N.