The Swahili people thought of it as a soul-stealing machine, but we just call it a camera, the magical tool that captures life as it happens. Nowadays, everyone has one in some shape or form, and in the digital age we all have a favorite way to share our photos with each other. With such great accessibility to the technology, it seems we are all photographers, by habit, and by no means are we all good at it. We even use filtering apps that make our technically-deficient pictures interesting and “cool”. Photo albums we grew up with are now kitsch and old-timey. Social streams and photo feeds are now the timeline and portals to our memories. But, when it comes to making memories, has technology taken the soul out of photographs?

It used to be a given that a family snapshot would probably end up as an unspectacular picture, but it didn’t matter because the incentive to take the photo wasn’t artistic, but a pure desire to remember life’s events. Technology has distilled the artistic techniques formerly utilized exclusively by professionals and made them accessible to anyone with a digital device. So now the picture of Uncle Jim in the living room is no longer an off-center, overexposed disaster, but an edgy, filter-enhanced photo that makes you wonder less about the moment and when and where he was. So, has technology taken the soul out of our pictures? Though that picture of Uncle Jim has lost a bit of its context, probably not. But, technology has absolutely negated the acceptability of taking an all-around bad picture when your smartphone can singlehandedly filter your images to high-drama perfection.

Sharing these images has become just as easy as taking them and, in response, technology has evolved around this addiction we have with each other’s social lives with the integration of social platform sharing into just about every device and photo app. Now, the old-timey photo album is transformed to read in real-time and we are able to experience each other’s lives as they happen. The challenge is no longer sharing instantly, but recounting and explaining impactfully to future generations the volumes of stories we’re capturing.

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