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>The ensuing unqualified speculation at times borders on the ridiculous: "We are all taking too many photos and spending very little time looking at them." Maybe Sedaris and the New Yorker IT dept have developed a secret algo to qualify factual statements like this one?

If you treat social observations like physics, and expect statistical confirmation you're missing the plot.

Some of those cannot be statistically confirmed, but are nevertheless apparent to anyone with some life experience.

Others don't need to be confirmed, because they depend on subjective evaluations. You either come to see the writer's point and share their ethical values or not.

This very modern idea that any talk about society needs to be measured and analyzed with numbers and statistical proofs, is hampering our thinking. And it's even dangerous, people it gets people from thinking and evaluating arguments on their own, to blindly trusting some numbers which could be BS, manipulated, statistically non-representative etc.

But even more so, it kills their own appreciation and understanding of the world they live in, having them wait for 'the research' to come out for them to affirm anything.

"Photos are less markers of memories than they are Web-browser bookmarks for our lives." How so? Certainly not for myself. Albeit anecdotal, but I spend much more time these days joyfully poring over high-def Iphone photos snapped on trips away or of portraits of loved ones.

Thank you. I take several gigs of photos and videos of my two children every month, which I religiously back up to multiple places. As my boys get older, they love it when I open up a folder of media and get to watch themselves from times before they had developed the mental faculties to form memories of these events. I love it too. A year ago in a child's life seems like an eternity, and I cherish my photos and videos of what seems like such a long time ago.

That's why the first piece of advice I give new parents is, "You have a camera on your phone, use it every single day." Our memories are so fallible and life can be so wonderful, I don't understand how people can object to bottling up as much of it as possible to savor over and over again.

Tangentially related, but Black Mirror has a great episode which covers a similar premise to your 'contact lens size HoloLens' one.

Basically everything you see is recorded, and you can revisit any moment you've experienced any time you want. Which has many negative effects in the show, but which would actually avoid the author's problem altogether, as you no longer have to 'spend time' to take pictures.

If recording of all of your experiences (good and bad) are implicit, then will it improve our ability to live in the moment? Will it dilute the significance of the moments we want to 'choose' to remember if everything else is bundled in there too?

One of the suggestions of the episode seems to be that allowing ourselves to return to the past to such a degree can make it hard to escape from it and move on with out lives.

This episode was "The Entire History of You" if anyone is looking to check it out. It is one of the strongest episodes of all the series.

Hint: writing about photography is as subjective as photography itself. Sontag is the lowest hanging fruit a writer on photography can grab to prop up their writing.

I mean, look at the recent discussions Teju Cole sparked when he trashed Steve McCurry's work in the NYT Magazine.