Culture
How Instagram Alters Your Memory
A cautionary note about constant digital photography.
Our cities, neighborhoods, and favorite spaces have never been quite so widely photographed before. Anyone with a smart phone now has a camera. Anyone with Instagram is a faux-fine-art photographer. And any old subject – a puddle of water, a yellow school bus – suddenly demands we capture the moment.
It seems highly likely, though, that the ubiquity of digital photography – and the weird ways we now behave because of it – may be altering how we perceive the world around us. Technology is doing this in numerous ways. Why not through cell-phone cameras, too?