Too Much Information

Corey Ann had had enough. In a recent Huffington Post diatribe, the Ohio-based wedding photographer pointed out his experiences with wedding guests whose camera flashes disrupted his own professional photography. Such frustrations, presumably shared by many such photographers, led Ann to call for “unplugged weddings.”
But these guest photographers’ over-eagerness bears evidence of a deeper frustration about photography and social broadcasting today. The obsession with recording, editing, and broadcasting every worthy moment of the modern life has created a troublesome dual reality: the physical world in which we exist, and the digital world in which we live.
The Appeal of Social Media
In literary icon Susan Sontag’s well-known critique On Photography, she observed that while “Mallarmé said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book … today everything exists to end in a photograph.” What Sontag writes about photography can just as well be applied to social media; both activities record events, though social media has the added power of broadcasting such events.
Indeed, both the proliferation of the printing press in early modern Europe and the advent of social media and public rating systems today has left the world unsure of how it should cope with unprecedented levels of information and accessibility. We have, for lack of a better option, increasingly integrated our lives with technology.
But what exactly is the appeal of photography—and, today, of social media—that allows us to so readily supplement our realities with records of our realities? Sontag writes that the “photographic enterprise” gives us the illusion that we can “hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images.” It is important to note here that Sontag speaks not of photography in its highest form but of photography insofar as it acts as a mass art, accessible to all. The allure of photography lies in the feeling that photography is control.
This sense of control is reflected also in social media. A May 2013 Pew Research Center study found that of teens who use social media, 59 percent deleted something they had previously posted, 53 percent deleted comments others made to their profile page, and 45 percent untagged photos of themselves. The study stated that teens take significant steps to “shape their reputation, manage their networks, and mask information they don’t want others to know.”
With the illusion of control social media affords us, we can create perfect images of ourselves and then posit that these images are reality. Facebook profiles suggest just that: the walls of your friends are complete profiles of who they are. Yet creating statuses, posting certain photos and not others, and generating “likes” all contribute to the fabrication of an identity that is inherently an incomplete, if more desirable, representation of the self.
Are We All Pole Dancing on the Internet?
Fashion photographer Richard Avedon said, “I often feel that people come to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or fortune teller: to find out how they are.” Social media can pervert this desire into an obsession of editing who we are perceived to be. Yet the act of broadcasting reveals another source of appeal: that of public approval. Sontag writes that the photo is itself a judgment, that to take a photo is to ask others to judge its content. Social media, via Facebook “likes” or shares or page views, has gone further by collecting these judgments en masse, both creating and feeding a collective social anxiety towards public approval.
To this end, participants in the May 2013 Pew study reported that “Facebook is a challenging space because so many others are there and watching and judging.” As a result, “looking good— physically and reputationally [sic]—is a big deal.” The impetus behind controlling and broadcasting a pseudo-reality of the self is the pressure to create an appealing self-portrait that others will applaud.
The emergence of the “selfie” as the ultimate form of social photography is more evidence for this need to appeal to others. In a recent New York Times piece entitled “My Selfie, Myself,” Jenna Wortham described the selfie as “the perfect preoccupation for our Internet-saturated time, a ready-made platform to record and post our lives where others can see and experience them.” Because selfies give the photographer control over the creation and broadcasting of his own portrayal, they are really just the latest, and perhaps most democratic, form of advertising.
Sasha Weiss’s New Yorker article, “We Are All Pole Dancing on the Internet,” shows how this trend has shaped the very public online presence of Edward Snowden’s girlfriend, Lindsay Mills. In puzzling contrast to Snowden’s withdrawn temperament, Mills posted several photos meant to portray a certain Lindsay Mills. In one photo she poses in her underwear, one hiking boot, and one high heeled shoe, with the caption “wild + refined #selfportrait.”
That we should be so paranoid about private surveillance and yet so willing to broadcast ourselves says something more complex than just that we value privacy. We struggle to at once protect our identities and promote our self-portraits.
Super Sad Truth?
The illusion that social media projects reality, and the fact that it does not, is even more troublesome given that interactions via social media tend to be superficial. The Pew study found that while 89 percent of boys and 94 percent of girls share photos
of themselves via social media, only 26 percent of boys and 14 percent of girls share phone numbers on social media.
The desire to project ourselves and participate in digital voyeurism, and our simultaneous unwillingness to connect with those who applaud us is a troubling testament to the superficiality of social media. Here, we see the timelessness of Sontag’s criticism; “Photography, which has so many narcissistic uses, is a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the world … It offers, in one easy, habit-forming activity, both participation and alienation in our own lives and those of others.”
In his novel Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart illustrates a near-future world in which people define themselves by their “hotness” quotient and qualities such as physical attractiveness are quantified and prioritized. Such a world is becoming too easy to imagine. Channels of social media that aggrandize social hierarchy and superficiality reflect the anxiety of the times: we are too attuned to what others think of us.
And yet, social media is here to stay. The question now is in what direction we will take it. Sontag wrote, “To collect photographs is to collect the world.” It is now our choice to determine whether the world we collect and share will be a meaningful one.
Professor Dennis Tenen, a leader in the study of digital humanities at Columbia University, is optimistic about where social media can take us. “The problem with social media is that there is a critical mass concentrated in very few places: Facebook, Twitter … When this is the case, the user becomes the used.”
If there are more efforts to inform users about the technology, and more diverse channels of social media, people will be more proactive about the means of social participation. “Through advocacy,” Tenen says, “people can become active and informed users of social media.”
Despite the prominence of digital self-fashioning, social networks have the ability to democratize connections, the potential to share earnest nuggets of truth, the power to spread revolutionary ideas. Wortham suggests that even selfies can be an opportunity to share meaningful experiences as “a kind of visual diary, a way to mark our short existence … as proof that we were here.” We are, after all, human. We record and we reflect. But in between recording and editing our experiences, we must remember to live.