I guess it comes down to how you see the world. Personally, I'd rather be fully immersed in whatever I am experiencing in real life, and not weighed down by likes and comments on a social media platform.

Edited to add:

I recently came across this quote from Norman Wirzba, a theologian at Duke University:

Media platforms and technological devices are not simply neutral tools that we use to move through life. Their power is much more extensive, because they shape and frame what we perceive and understand the wold to be. When people spend enough time in front of screens, it becomes all but inevitable that the whole world takes on the character of something to be watched. Given the technologies we now have for manipulating screens in whatever fashion we like to suit our own particular tastes, if we find the Mona Lisa boring, no problem. We can run the image through the Fatify app or add the graphics and colors we like to make it amusing or better than the original! Should we be surprised that people often find the world uninteresting and dull?

Reframe it this way. What's more important: the inert and inanimate surroundings of Angkor Wat, or sharing that experience with your friends and family?

When I post a picture on FB or text it, I'm not "looking for social approval." I'm reaching out to friends who aren't there with me and saying "hey man, check this out!"

I would say the former. There are so many things about "being there" that even the world's best photographer with the world's best camera equipment would have a hard time capturing. I'm a hobbyist photographer myself, but there are some times I just want to put my camera away and "take a memory".

My memories of precious moments (first hours with my son, etc) are fragile and fleeting, and already mostly gone. Most of the time the pictures I take are not very good at capturing the essence of what I want to remember, but other times ... it really does. Seeing video of my kids scampering through a park in Ireland, or photos of them from years ago at the beach capture aspects of them that I had forgotten.

Often the pictures remind me not of what is in the picture, but help me remember what I was doing, where I was, and the things around it.

Definitely the former.

I don't go somewhere so I can take pictures to show my friends, I go there because I want to see/experience it for myself. Plus friends don't care to see more than a few pictures, anyway.

Great for you. I personally care a lot more about sharing something with my family or friends. I probably wouldn't go anywhere if I couldn't share it with someone.

And I do the same thing. It's the "looking for social approval" that's the issue here.

> "if we find the Mona Lisa boring, no problem. We can run the image through the Fatify app or add the graphics and colors we like to make it amusing or better than the original! Should we be surprised that people often find the world uninteresting and dull?"

How is the ability to play with the Mona Lisa not part of the world? Our lives online aren't imaginary, they're just as real a part of our world as the physical. If you enjoy tweaking the Mona Lisa, making it more personal, then that's you actively finding the world interesting and fun.

Ahhh! You just sparked a memory of an old graphics application on the computer that let you use smudge and liquify like tools on Mona Lisa's face to distort it in all sorts of ways. I remember playing with that constantly, thinking the technology was soo futuristic, being able to make the Mona Lisa look evil and cartoonish. You could do it with your own pictures too, but the default image was Mona Lisa. I wish I could remember what that software was called.

But anyway, some of this stuff predates social media and smartphones. And it was more of a novelty than anything. It might have even given me greater appreciation for the painting, since it is such a great painting for distorting human features.

Kai's Power Goo?

Yep, pretty sure that was it. Thanks!

What I don't understand is why "we" have your personal problem.

I don't know if I can blame social media for this or not, but people vastly overstating their arguments because they are caught up in their own emotions does not make for illuminating discourse.

As I understand it, we're slowly tying behaviour of this sort - essentially, being in a state of seeking constant approval from others - to increased risk of mental health issues as time goes on. It also makes it a hell of a lot more difficult to do anything that one's peers wouldn't approve of.

"Freedom discovers you the moment you lose concern over what impression you are making or about to make" -Bruce Lee

I usually don't share pictures until I'm back from vacation. I spend a lot of time sorting and sifting through the photos, picking only the best to share.

People have a very short attention span. If your vacation album has more than 50 photos, it doesn't matter how good the photos are, or how exciting the experience is.

same here. when going on vacation compared to weekend outing, we usually bring quite a few photos from various sources (recent trip to Borneo - my dslr, gopro for diving, fiancee's point-and-shoot used also heavily in underwater housing for diving, her cell phone which she carries everywhere compared to camera). All combined it was cca 2000 pieces, damn too much but when you are there seeing all the diffrent beauty all the time, it's hard to resist snapping more than bare minimum.

the issue among others is, the most amazing places are sometimes off the grid, some photos require some proper processing (panoramas, night shots with milky way etc). which tends to take a lot of time and you need proper PC for it (lightroom, autopano, photoshop etc).

it would be a poor use of precious vacation time to spend evenings editing photos, wouldn't it...

on the other hand, however amazing it was (and it was, highly recommending before those idiots burn rest of rainforest and transform it into palm tree plantations) - I am not going to look in next months into photos once processed, however amazing they are (and some, especially diving and jungle ones are really :-O to me). we do various mountain stuff a lot and most weekends tend to bring additional set of pics. so it has to be process-quickly-and-move-on, otherwise it takes all my free time.

So the answer to "Why?" is "because I say so".

The social problem might lie in the addictive nature of likes and approval, the pressure to get those degrading actual quality of the photos (live stream vs curating later) and degrading the experience for the vacationer; lose-lose while Instagram wins thru eyeballs.