The internet is an amazing invention in that it allows the near-instantaneous transmission of data such as photos. If I take a photo of a White-faced Whistling Duck in Brazil, someone in Japan can see it in a matter of seconds after I upload it. In theory this sounds like a big improvement for photography. Not only can I share with more people than was ever possible without the internet, but I can also see a greater variety of photography from around the world.
Yet, I think the benefits of sharing photos online are illusory, and I online sharing is empty.
And the key reason is anonymity. Even if I know the names and even faces of the people on the other side of the globe, they are relatively anonymous in the sense that I rarely get to know something about them beyond their online avatars. This anonymity goes against the very reason I want to share photos, and that is the desire to transmit and share human experience.
This transmission of human experience is about sharing yourself and understanding the experiences of others. If a good friend shows me a picture of a bird, I gain a new understanding of that friend. If I meet a photographer in a park, even if I don’t have much interaction with them, I still have some personal experience with them. Thus, a photo from them adds to that experience. But a photo on its own, seen for a few minutes, only to be replaced by the next photo with a scroll, is like a headless body: it exists in a vacuum away from all sanity.
I noticed that online, when I view photos from people, I rarely develop any connection with them. I think that’s because all interactions with them have an impersonal basis. No words exchanged relate to caring about the other, and none are filled with any shared joy that naturally comes about with in-person interaction. People rarely take the time to really analyze or comment on individual photos. Instead, they just want a quick glimpse only to move onto the next thousand photos.
It’s not hard to understand why. The internet modifies human interaction so that people can only chase impersonal attention, and that cannot be sufficient for genuine human interaction. The software is designed to focus narcissism, because primarily, it pushes people into only thinking about themselves rather than who they are interacting with. The sea of voices is transformed into an anonymous mass of pseudo-humanity that forms a vapid attempt at replacing human interaction, and it fails spectacularly.
That’s not to say that a person cannot form genuine connections online, and cannot have a good experience sharing their photography. Of course, there are exceptions. The internet is a vast platform with many possibilities, and I’ve made a few genuine relationships on it. Rather, I am only saying that in general the internet fights hard against genuine human interaction, and that the vast majority of photo-sharing instances on the internet lack genuine human connection.
That’s why we have so many fake photos online, because human connection is not the ultimate aim anymore. Yes, people have been making fake photos for a long time, even before the internet. But that does not negate the fact that the internet encourages and amplifies this phenomenon. It’s also why people are so hell-bent on using artificial intelligence to push a new fake and soulless reality that accelerates the climb to new heights of attention-seeking, and forgoes all honesty.
Thus, as a photographer, I gain much more satisfaction by sharing my photos with real people, rather than on pseudo-anonymous social media platforms or forums such as DPReview. If you feel similarly about sharing your photos or in general, your creative work, I suggest that you find alternatives to sharing online, such as sharing in person in your local community. It’s far more interesting and more worthwhile than the corporately-controlled trash pile that we call the internet.