Taking photos on your smartphone could be spoiling your memories. Linda Henkel, a psychology professor at Fairfield University suggests that taking photos of ‘memories’ can actually impair your ability to remember the events later.
Have you ever been at a festival or a concert and looked around to see a sea of phones filming the performer? Or even seen people on nights out having picture after picture rather than actually enjoying themselves? Nowadays people are becoming obsessed with documenting every step of their lives, because after all, if you didn’t get a photo did you even go out?
Take people in Hong Kong for example, they always take pictures of their food before eating it to post on their socials. They even have a phrase: ‘seung gei sik si’ which means ‘the camera eats first’.
Why do they do this? Why do we feel the need to take pictures of minor things in our day to day lives. Psychologists have said that taking photos of your food can be a sign of mental health problems. The fact that rather than photographing the people you’re with or the restaurant you’re in you are photographing your food, implies that food plays an excessive role in your life.
When Cameras were first invented, they were mainly used for portraits of the famous or friends and families, travel pictures, pictures of landscapes, animals, flowers.
Nowadays we use them for so much more.
The role of photos has moved on from it’s primary use of commemorating special events and remembering family life, to being a way of communicating to our friends and forming an identity to boost our egos.
Researcher Linda Henkel says that “many times people are taking photos – not to serve as a later memory cue, but rather to say this is how I’m feeling right here, right now”. Snapchat is a prime example in this, its main use is for people to communicate with each other via pictures.
Are we taking too many pictures do you think?
Rach's English Language and New Media Blog 
I really do agree with you here. I often find myself taking pictures or videos whenever I attend an event of some kind as I feel the need to document what I have been up to despite only sharing it with a few people afterwards. Taking pictures has become such a significant part of our lives, so much that it becomes difficult to resist taking pictures. I know the feeling of getting back from an event, not having taken a picture and for some reason feeling guilty. Why do we feel the need to have evidence of us enjoying ourselves?
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After reading your post, I feel quite conflicted on the topic. I do see how excessively taking photos and video could limit some of your experiences. For example, nothing infuriates me more than when you’re at a concert and all you can see is an ocean of people who have paid hundreds of pounds to be front row just watching the artist perform from behind their phone screen! That I don’t understand. However, I do see how photography could be a hobby, just like jogging, just like rock climbing, just like knitting. I rarely see people claiming that we should give up these kinds of hobbies, so how comes photography is often targeted just because it uses a relatively new form of digital media? Arguably photography is often less dangerous than a lot of other hobbies, yet it is still picked out as one that could cause harm. It is just interesting to me to see the two sides!
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