Put your camera away. Stop taking pictures. Live in the moment. These are utterances often heard in today’s digital age, as social media apps become a common feature of our everyday experiences with the frequent snap-snap of the camera.
In 2015 alone, Facebook users uploaded two billion pictures daily; Instagram users uploaded 80 million pictures daily; Snapchat users, as of January 2016, shared 9,000 pictures per second. The numbers invite concern. If people are too busy taking pictures of sunsets and their dinner plates, could they be missing out on the experiences that they photograph? Many seem to think so. There are a number of business owners in New York City, for example, who have banned photography from restaurants, arguing that taking pictures will ruin the dining experience.
Shutter Happy
But there’s a new study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which says don’t put the camera away; keep taking pictures. First mentioned in Time and The Atlantic, Kristin Diehl, a professor at the University Of Southern California Marshall School of Business, and her team of colleagues performed nine experiments—in both the laboratory and the field—to test how photo-taking affects people’s enjoyment of their own experiences.
Tourists, diners, students, and sightseers of all ages, races, sex, and socioeconomic backgrounds were surveyed at a variety of locales, including a sightseeing tour, restaurants, and museums. The results were surprising. Diehl says, photo-taking can “heighten enjoyment of positive experiences, and does so because photo-taking increases engagement.” In other words, when people take pictures, they are more engaged with the experience that they are photographing.
As she explained to a Times reporter, “what we find is you actually look at the world slightly differently, because you’re looking for things you want to capture, that you may want to hang onto.” Diehl concludes, “that gets people more engaged in the experience, and they tend to enjoy it more.” So, contrary to the opinions of many New York City restaurateurs, when people take pictures of their plates of food, they not only become more engaged with the dining experience, but they actually enjoy the dining experience more as well.
Instagram: Image Isn’t Everything
Diehl’s study is good news for Instagram. The social media app relies on the act of taking and editing pictures to be shared with others. Because of the app’s sole reliance on “the image,” it has received its fair share of criticism. Famed writer Susan Sontag could very much be echoing the sentiments of many with regards to Instagram when she writes: “needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”
There have been countless opinion pieces, including ones from The Guardian and The New York Times, lamenting the superficiality of snapping and preserving experiences in filters. In light of Diehl’s study, however, Instagram has the opportunity to reorient itself not as an addictive and superficial piece of consumerism, but rather as a platform that celebrates the joy of taking pictures and capturing life events at the same time. Instagram, along with it’s picture-heavy social media peers, is a happy place – and science says so!
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