Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmj | Hacker News Reader

“Instagram,” Suler said, “is therefore a tool for validating one’s life.”

I think this is the crux of the issue. You are right--photography has been part of vacations since cameras were generally available. But what's different is the real-time nature of sharing those images, and the real time acceptance (or rejection) of those images via likes and comments. If those are more important than the lived experience, then, I think we have a problem.

I'm a friendly critic of Instagram (it is the only social media outlet my wife and I use). It is perfect for sharing images while we travel. It is also easy, however, to get up checking if folks have liked our photos, or commented on them. That's not Instagram's fault, of course, but I wouldn't even worry about such things if we weren't sharing photos almost immediately.

View on HN

And before the camera people made sketches and drawings of places and things they visited. The first thing that comes to mind is Darwin's drawings.

I worked on a mega yacht and the thing that most separated me from everyone else as I interacted with the owners and guests is the context of our stories that we tell. I might tell a story set in inner city high school I went to in lower Manhattan while their son tells a story that is set at Phillips Exeter Academy. The point is what separates me most is context. It is really important for a young person to separate herself from her peers by being in the context of being at Coachella. There is more than just memories. It is also about social standing.

I think there's a huge difference between a drawing and an Instagram photo. The former requires an in-depth look at something for an extended period of time, while the latter takes a few seconds.

I feel most of the "social platforms" are more of show-off-right-now platforms

I'm not criticizing the act of taking photos while traveling (or, even when not traveling). It is a craft, an art, and a way to record history. I've got no problem with that. The issue is when the act of taking and posting those photos is simply about self-validation that we have a problem. Spending your holiday constantly checking your phone to see if people have liked your latest photos doesn't seem very relaxing.

But "we" don't have a problem because we don't do it. And "they" don't have a problem either, because they choose to do it (unless the behaviour is compulsive in some way).

That's not how I would spend a vacation myself, but it's their vacation and their time. If they enjoy the attention, what's wrong with them enjoying it?

This is how those people go through daily life. For them, vacation is about relating to other people--the people they are with and their friends and family elsewhere. They want to share everything they are involved in, and in part they want to make themselves look good. So they take photos and they immediately share them.

This may not seem relaxing to you, but I don't see how it's a problem. It's how they want to spend their vacation--and even if it is not relaxing, it's what they want to do. What's the problem?

A complaint seems to be "people are spending too much time photographing and not enough time experiencing the place." Photographing and sharing is precisely how many people experience the place, along with sharing those photographs and by seeing the photographs of others. Those people are sociable and like to share. That's not bad.

Personally I am not like that. If one wants a quiet vacation experience without big crowds, it is easy to get. For instance I often hear Yellowstone is crowded. While there I never understood this perception--it seemed expansive and quiet to me as we plied the roads and hiked down the trails. Then we saw Old Faithful. It was like going to the shopping mall. Same goes for this guy seeing this place in Cambodia. I'd bet anything that if he just strayed a couple thousand feet from whatever vista this was, he would have experienced "the real place," whatever he wanted that to be.

These sociable folks who want to share photos are like that every day. They're not going to change because they're on vacation, nor should they. Similarly the people who just want to experience wherever they are without sharing it with everyone are going to be like that everyday. They don't change while on vacation either. There's nothing wrong with the folks who want to share and pieces like this one are nothing but a bunch of snobbery. If the writer wants to spend his/her vacation being a snob, well, ok. The folks taking the photos and sharing them are probably enjoying their vacations. Hopefully he is enjoying his by being a snob.

The problem is that it's unhealthy to be wholly focused on only 1 aspect of your life. Plenty of people become depressed by not feeling socially validated on social media.

I suspect most of these people are already depressed, and the validation they find in social media staves off the more severe feelings.

Or it's become something of an addiction to them, and a lack of validation (either a lack of "likes" or an inability to post) results in withdrawal, which can cause depression and shares some behavioral symptoms with depression.

> I think this is the crux of the issue. You are right--photography has been part of vacations since cameras were generally available. But what's different is the real-time nature of sharing those images, and the real time acceptance (or rejection) of those images via likes and comments. If those are more important than the lived experience, then, I think we have a problem.

Why?

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.

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

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.

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 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!"

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

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.

> "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.

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.

Funny thing is that it's actually a tool to validate one's life to the corporation that owns and possesses that data. You validated nothing by being a corporate drone other than that you are a corporate drone that was milked all our life.

I use Instagram as my own personal diary of pictures, but I don't set my profile as "private" so anyone is free to enjoy my pictures, or not. I don't give a shit.

If you start adding hash tags to your photos, that's when you're chasing the validation game and it becomes everything I hate about social media / facebook.

Other than the ease of distribution, is this so awfully different from slideshows and the like? There are two kinds of tourists; tourists who go places to see places, and tourists who go places to be seen in places. The only difference in my mind today versus "back then" is that the rise of social media sites has made it much easier to be seen in places, and so has made the second type of traveler more prolific and well known.

In the end, it's their vacation, and if sitting around taking photos of everything is their way of relaxing, who is anyone else to judge? As usual these sorts of posts come down to entirely too much interest in what everybody else is doing, mind your own business.

"I think we have a problem."

I think this is a lifestyle choice and you have a problem if you have a problem with your behavior or don't like the result of it. If i see people doing it and they are happy why should it be a problem?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com