Instabook? Facegram?

Instabook? Facegram? I cannot seem to remember for the life of me. (Get it?)

When was the last time you went a day without social media? When was the last time you enjoyed your view rather than posted it? Do you even remember what you post? These are some first-world problems our society has come to terms with. We tend to focus more on our social media rather than reality causing us to not pay full attention and forget details. Henkel raises the question, “To what extent does capturing one’s life events with a camera shape what one subsequently remembers?” As she later suggests, people can think of this answer in different situations. People tend to argue that by taking a picture, you can remember better. In fact, people tend to omit details of the reality because they are not focused on it. They are focused on the phone that focused on the picture. Some argue that my taking pictures, we are losing mental muscle because we are relying on the picture to show us the image over and over again rather than remembering the original. By having easy access to camera’s, we see it easier to snap a picture rather than take in the original.

In my opinion, I truly have mixed emotions on technology to begin with and even more mixed emotions with social media. I believe that social media is taking over society nowadays. Now whenever you go out, anywhere at any moment you can probably spot AT LEAST 2 or 3 people on their phones. Whether it be taking a phone call, texting, emailing, or posting, people are always glued to their phones.

Now in ways that social media can alter our memory, it does not surprise me one bit. Like I have stated before, we have come to terms with our first-world problems and accepted them rather than dispute them. We more or less end up harming ourselves in the doing because we are becoming dependent on them for everything. Now the question is, where do we draw the line? When we can sit in our chairs forever glued to our phones while our robots do everything for us? While that is (hopefully) far, far in the future, if we do not take charge this can get out of hand quick.

In her experiment, she gave cameras out to take pictures of certain things. She found that when they took photos of the art, they had a hard time the next day remembering exactly what they looked at. It helped when she asked them to zoom into detail on the art, they remembered the details better. When they only observed the art, they were more likely to remember what they saw. Reading these articles that we were assigned made me think of plenty of things from my personal experiences. When I was in Costa Rica (CR) I made a promise to myself that after I captured my million-dollar picture, I would actually take in the scenery I am capturing in reality and not just on my screen. While I do reference to my pictures from CR a lot, I find that I enjoy explaining my experiences to people and the pictures are just the icing on the cake.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/12/how-camera-phones-modify-our-memories/7829/