Clicking Through Life

Log onto Facebook Mini-feed these days and you’re bound to be notified that one acquaintance or another has uploaded photos of herself and her five thousand (marginally cute) friends. Inevitably, she has titled her photo album something along the lines of “Hotness!!!” or “All my favorite girls!!!” Actually, you yourself have probably made such an album at some point—almost all of us have, I am afraid. Maybe you titled yours “H-Bomb,” since that’s a popular dub.

Within such photo albums are extensive chronicles of undergraduates’ lives. Though some feature specific events like dinner parties or semi-formals, many are mundane records of day-to-day episodes. A friend of mine has an entire series of photo albums of his roommate carrying out daily chores. “Joe sweeps,” a caption reads. In another photo album I have stumbled upon, a sweet little study bug of a girl has posted snapshots of her friends hunched over textbooks in Lamont.

Still worse than that banality, some photo albums consist entirely of photos of the creator. A girl I vaguely know recently uploaded 40 or so photos she had taken of herself in an album she entitled, “Shameless Vanity.” A nice effort to poke fun at yourself, sweetheart, but we all know better—you didn’t need to point out the shameless vanity bit to us.

The loveliest genre of all is the drunken photos. A growing number of Harvard undergraduates have a penchant for posting photos of themselves and their friends guzzling from beer funnels or passed out on the sticky floor of a sweaty dorm room in Currier House. The captions for such photos usually involve the phrase “OMG was so EFFIN’ trashed DO NOT REMEMBER THIS AT ALL,” or something along those lines. This sort of thing has always puzzled me. What is the value in that pre-hangover photo, and what memory does it preserve? Look, Ma, I can’t hold my liquor?

I can’t help but think of that ancient superstition that a photo taken robs a bit of a person’s soul. If this were the case, most undergraduates would be in trouble. But then, so would everyone else. Yuppies, hippies, jocks, and soccer moms—people everywhere are snapping away.

It used to be that a camera served as a means to remember a special event, but in the digital age, photography has fallen victim to the superfluous. A camera is no longer a means to record our lives—increasingly, it is our way of living it. No longer do we click a picture to remember strolling lazily on a bridge on a midsummer day; we dash to the bridge precisely to remember posing on it.

There is more beauty to an immediate experience than there is to one mediated by a camera. Ultimately, there is a time for photographs, but there are more times to put the cameras down.

We may make fun of the tourists buzzing around the John Harvard Statue, but with our digital cameras in grip, we’re hardly much better. If we want a true picture of what life is in 2006, we ought to take some photographs of the photographers.



Lucy M. Caldwell ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history and science concentrator in Adams House.