Social media killed the photography star

The content-ification of photography

Being born in the (very) late 90s — 24 days before the year 2000 to be specific — I barely experienced life without social media. At age 10 I had my first flip phone, and the following year the iPod Touch came out. Life changing, that was.

My pre-teen years were filled with farming digital crops on Facebook and playing Habbo Hotel on my dad’s work computer, my mid-teen years were spent trying to get Tumblr famous and my late teens finally saw success as I ran a somewhat popular Instagram account showcasing my photography. 900 likes a pop. The Gen Z gold rush.

But that all died three years ago. COVID and Instagram’s new algorithm favoring video were the final nail in the coffin. Now I have photos upon photos that have never seen the light of day. I appear to have attained a new nihilistic attitude towards the whole damned thing.

We’ve created an absolute monster: social media

Did people hate books this much when they first became a thing?

Actually, yes.

The advent of the printing press in 1436 represented a colossal shift in how we consume media, just as social media has done for us now.

Towards the end of the 1700s, the idea that books were creating housebound and anti-social, dirty-minded addicts proliferated the upper echelons of society (though had Colleen Hoover existed around this time, I wouldn’t have blamed them for worrying).

Even Socrates had a thing or two to say about reading:

"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

It’s amusing to think that in perhaps 200 years, people will laugh at us for hating on social media and the rapid changes technology has brought and how we’re struggling to grapple with them.

It’s even more amusing to think about how bad we are at predicting how technology will change us — for good or for worse.

In the 1940s we thought everyone would have their very own helicopter sitting in their garage by the 1960s. In the 1960s, we thought hovercars would revolutionise transport as we knew it by the 2000s. In the 2000s we probably got quite a few predictions right because, well, it wasn’t really that long ago. Regardless, we seemed to get a long wrong about personal transport. Now where’s my high-speed rail to Melbourne?

This brings us to a rather interesting point:

“The real changes that the computer is bringing about are changes in the way we see reality. And we do not yet have an adult generation that's known the computer from the cradle. All of us see the computer against the background of the not-computer. All of us typed before we word-processed. All of us learned the algorithms of arithmetic before we used hand calculators. All of us see the PC against the backdrop of a world without it. What we cannot see at all is how a mind will work when it's never known anything but the PC.” John H. Lienhard 1998

That quote is from 1998, and well, now we actually do have a generation that knows nothing but the PC. iPad kids. Gen Alpha. And some of Gen Z, if we’re being fair.

Unlike with the books, maybe we have a right to be worried about how society is tracking with this new technology? Murder has never been in vogue and we’ve always seemed to be right about that.

So what does this have to do with photography?

I hope you enjoyed the slow ride to the point of this post.

Because creating content (and these days, a sticky toddler celebrating its 2nd birthday with cake smeared across its face counts as content) seems to be at the core of how we operate on social media, photography has entered an entirely new world and way in which it is used and understood.

Rather than seeing photography as an art form, it is seen as content. I’m coining this as “content-ification”.

As someone who grew up in the digital era, creating has become less about personal pleasure and more about recognition and validation. And that’s dangerous for our art form.

It makes us cynical.

It leads us to create content, not art.

It pushes us to view photography as objective rather than subjective.

In a world where all it takes is one viral post or video to get famous, we seem to have lost focus of what really matters and why we view creativity as an outlet, not as a money-and-fame-maker.

And this comes from someone who does this shit for a living. Not the photography, otherwise I wouldn’t be here talking about it. But the social media stuff. Yeah I do hate my career, no need to ponder about that one.

Even as I’m writing this very post, I’ve managed to google “is Substack actually worth it reddit”, scrolling through multiple threads to find out if people will actually read this.

But that’s not the point of this exercise. The point of this is to get back into the habit of creating for myself — not for an audience. It’s to get into the habit of not seeking validation, but deriving it from the act of actually doing.

Art is still art, even if no-one sees it. Art is the act of going through with an idea, whether it fails or not.

So this is a commitment to myself in sharing my photographs in a way that I think is less harmful and is more meaningful.

I’m not sure how this Substack will take shape yet, so I’ll do a bit of experimenting. Maybe it’ll be a little about the effect social media is having on photography, maybe it’ll be a few photography assignments here and there.

Let me know what you think, mysterious reader.

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