What’s the point in posting our pictures online?
Especially when it’s highly likely there’s a better picture of the same place taken by someone way more experienced than us.
A few months ago, I asked myself the question ‘what’s the point?’ while taking a picture of a city landscape. And I meant it. What’s the point in taking your own pictures of something that’s all over the internet already, on high definition and through the lens of professional photographers? What were my pictures adding to the world? Asking myself this question led to an Instagram clean-up — I archived more than 100 posts because I didn’t think there was any point in them. This included landscapes, sunsets, monuments, general stuff that I took pictures of because I felt like sharing them. Also selfies.
It was only a few days ago, a couple of months after I decided to give up on sharing pictures, that I realized there IS a point.
I was on a plane, the sky looked gorgeous, you could see rivers and a whole town and clouds. I had an urge to take a picture of that. And I wanted to share it with my small niche of 500 followers. Only then I realized that it does make sense, that not only it is completely justified that you want to share, but that people actually want to see it.
Take Malta. This is where I am at the moment. I knew the city before I got here. I knew it from pictures on the internet — Googled pictures that I looked at when I booked my trip. But also pictures on my friends’ Instagram feeds. I took my own pictures on the last four days and shared them. And they looked completely different from the ones I ever saw online or on social media. And this is the point. When you post pictures, you are offering the ones who see them a different look at the stuff that already exists in their minds, and you are giving the people who’ve never seen those things before your perspective. They might want to go to a certain place in the world because of the way you’ve portrayed it.
I used to hate people who took pictures of food when they went to a restaurant. I used to get really pissed at the way people have grown so attached to this sharing thing. The way they grab their phones before they even grab their fork. But hey. I’ve been to restaurants because someone on my ‘following’ list has been there and it looked like it was worth a visit. Plus, when you think about it, it is a common habit. My parents have pictures of dinner tables from parties. They actually did spend film on those things. And now we can do it on unlimited clicks, and it takes just a tiny bit of space on your phone’s gallery. It is justified.
Posting your pictures online is sharing your perspective. You can have five different people locked up in the same place, and their pictures will all look different — hell, they might even look like they weren’t in the same space at all. And this is the point — perspective.
But that’s not all. Unless you have a direct interest in something, you will probably never google it. There are a lot of things that we only get to know because for some reason they come across our path. This can be Instagram or Facebook posts, some highlight on the news, a friend or family member mentions it for some reason. This means that there are thousands of millions of things that will always go unnoticed and that we will never hear about. That’s the sad reality of the world we live in. But think about it the other way around — think about all the things that you’ve got to know because someone took a picture of it and shared it on social media. Food, places, even people. Movies, songs, books. Events, festivals, fashion. Imagine that you would have to go and look for this stuff all by yourself. Fortunately, you don’t have to do this now.
Of all the information that we are forced to drink in during a single day, most of it might never be of interest to us. Yet, we are given the power to choose: choose what might interest you, follow certain topics, see what people are up to.
So when you think about whether or not it’s worth sharing… forget those second thoughts. This is your way of seeing the world. There are people interested in it. You are bringing something new to their day. They might scroll past it, they may ignore it and think it’s useless, but it will be out there for everyone else to absorb. It will reach someone. And that’s the point in it.
