Om Malik on the declining sale of camera, why this trend will continue, and our relationship with photo taking:
What we are doing is creating selfies, documenting moments with family, and snapping photos of food and latte art. We aren’t even trying to build a scrapbook of those images. It is all a stream — less for remembrance than for real-time sharing. In other words, we have changed our relationship with photography and photographs. It used to be that, photos served as a portal to our past. Now, we are moving so fast as we try to keep up in the age of infinitesimal attention spans. A minute, might as well be a month ago.
[…] People talk about printing photos, but very few people actually do. Most of our images are sitting in cloud accounts that sync with our smartphone cameras.
We snap every day moments with our phones because it’s the most convenient option. Food, receipt and just about anything we don’t want to be forgotten. These are momentary snapshots unlikely to be revisited often, not with tens of thousands of pictures already in our album.
We snap, share, take a fleeting look at them, and move on.