The Problem with Social Media and Photography.

Photography has never been more accessible — or more distracting. We’ve never shared so many images, yet spent so much time consuming other people’s.

Welcome to another blog post, can you believe it’s already Sunday evening again? Where on earth do the weekends get to?

Anyway…

I came up with this blog idea when I was writing my 10 Photobooks YOU Should Own Blog and I was typing about “On Photography” by Susan Sontag, a book in which she talks about the way in which we consume photography and how it could mean that we become desensitised to things such as the artrocities of war, how we could end up with a distorted view of the world around us. She explores the idea of control we have as photographers and also looks at how we can end up becoming people who consume life through photography instead of actually living our lives.

Strap in, I feel like this could end up becoming more of an essay than a blog entry, but we will see how we get on. I’m not even sure how long this one is going to take me to write (it’s currently 1 minute to midnight the night before the Amazon Black Friday Sale goes live and I am hoping to grab some bargain last minute Christmas gifts (EDIT: it’s now gone midnight and I was successful!), I have just finished and scheduled the photo books blog and I am trying to be productive instead of just sitting here scrolling. .

All of the things Sontag said resonated with me, especially that final point about consuming life through photographs (I’m going to include video in this as well). I think more so because I had myself just been consuming a couple of videos on YouTube about a couple of people who had brought “Brick” devices for their phones to limit the amount they are using them and to enable to break out of the cycle of doom scrolling.

This is a big bit of inspiration for this blog, alongside what I have read in Sontag’s book, coupled with some of my own experiences and those that have been shared with me by friends.

Social media is everywhere now, it has been for some time. It’s everywhere a lot of the time, because we take it with us. It’s on our phones, it’s in our pockets, it’s right in the palm of your hand, or at least within arms reach. And I’m not just talking about the obvious things such as Facebook, Instagram and X et al. I’m thinking about things like WhatsApp and Telegram, Discord and LinkedIn. I didn’t know until a few months ago when I was doing a digital marketing course that LinkedIn pre dated all of the things that I have just mentioned!

(Case in point… I finished writing the previous paragraph 15 minutes ago and that fifteen minutes has been lost because something popped up on my phone and I got stuck scrolling!)

The Internet Used to be a Place Where You Went.

When the internet first started to take off in the 90’s, it was clear it was going to be a big thing and that it was going to be important and was going to permeate every aspect of our lives. But back then, things were very different. Computers were huge, had massive CRT monitors, sat on big console style desks and took up a lot of room in the house.

At this point in time, mobile phones were similar… they were huge and didn’t do much other than make phone calls and there certainly wasn’t any internet on them.

But back to my original point about computers.They were so big that they didn’t move easily and the chances are that it was the only internet connected device in the house. It would be parked in a corner of a room, often a lounge, sometimes an office or a dining room. This meant that you had to move yourself to go the computer to access the internet… This meant that the internet was a place that you went.

There was almost a certain kind of ceremony to it - you’d log on and then have to connect to the internet through the phone line using your dial-up modem and if it connected first time then you had the world at your fingertips and a lot of what you could access was pretty basic! As Bo Burnham put it in “Welcome to The Internet”, it was a place of “catalogs, travel blogs, a chat room or two”. And as he goes on to say in the same song, these day’s it’s “a little bit of everything, all of the time”, and that can be quite distracting, especially as photographers when we are naturally predisposed to enjoy anything that is visual.

Now We Take The Internet Everywhere With Us.

And I mean everywhere. I think most people take their phone to the bathroom with them. Long gone are the days of reading the backs of the bottles of shampoo or a discarded copy of Take-a-Break. Now, we have the entire internet at our mercy, and social media is a huge part of the internet as we know it today. Facebook alone has over 3.07 billion active users. There are 8 billion people in the world so that’ almost 40% of the population, and that means there is an absolute ton of information being uploaded to it.

Then there’s YouTube. At the time of writing, you would need approximately 18,000 uninterrupted years (yes years) to watch all of the videos that exist on YouTube (you’d better have a premium account to ensure that you’re not wasting any of your 18,000 years watching adverts! (It was originally 17,000 year when I looked 3 weeks ago: the amount of content uploaded there is huge!)

And then there’s Instagram - the app that loves us to share our photos videos in the (often) vain hope that we will get our images seen by people other than our closest family and friends.

Oh, and TikTok… this can end up being a thief of life if you let it.

And let’s not forget X (formerly Twitter).

Now depending on the way you use social media and what you are looking/watching, how you consume it and what you’re into really affects this point that I am making:

I watch a lot of photography videos on YouTube (Nigel Danson, Thomas Heaton, Henry Turner, Peter McKinnon, James Popsys etc), I also watch a lot of popular science type content and I love watching ‘Kinging It’ doing up their “Scottage”! My other vice on here is fishing videos (something else I dabble in, but am not very good at). The first and last things in this are going to help me to make this point…

I love learning, I love getting better and I love cosuming this content and hearing the stories. But whilst I am watching YouTube and looking at other people doing it, I am not out there actually doing two of the things that I love. Sure, it’s great watching others and learning from them, but you can’t learn properly yourself without making your own mistakes. I work as a music teacher in “real life”, and I know that not one of my students would get better at playing the piano just by watching me and hearing how I corrected the mistakes. They need to make their own mistakes to be able to learn how to overcome them, and the same is true for us as photographers.

I have my own strategies for managing this; I tend to watch most of my YouTube when I am working in the studio (I am watching Henry Turner as I write this), it’s usually just on in the background and I will fully engage if something piques my interest.

I am on my phone too much, I know I am, mainly on Instagram for my sins. I upload my own content and consume that of others, but it still comes down to the same point; if I’m scrolling, I’m not shooting. If I’m not shooting, I’m not learning and if I’m not learning, I am most certainly not getting any better.

Making Comparisons

We all do this, we look at other people’s work and we compare our own work to theirs. This is great if you’re doing competitor analysis, but it can be harmful to your progress and growth, especially if you’re finding that people aren’t engaging with what you think is the best photograph you have ever taken!

Then, we fall into the trap of seeing an image we like and then going out and trying to take the same image. It’s probably one we have seen elsewhere before and this serves as a bit of a memory jog for us. When we stop scrolling and go out to take our own image, we don’t think it’s as good or we didn’t enjoy the experience, or when we got there, everyone else was there trying to take the same shot that they have also seen on Instagram and now yours is just going to get lost in amongst all of the others. Now, it’s overdone and no one is bothered any more. Social media is full of a lot of noise.

If you get stuck in a scrolling-cycle, you are becoming one of those people who is consuming life through photos and not enjoying life by living it. Be the person who people want to copy, get that original shot, find the new angle on an old favourite, but you aren’t going to do that sat on your bottom, in your lounge trying to get to the bottom of Instagram/YouTube/Facebook/etc/etc/etc.

So What Can You Do About It?

This is going to feel a little bit like a PSHE lesson, so prepare yourself…

Ultimately, this will be down to you and how you think you can manage it. I’ve already mentioned that I try to limit my YouTube consumption to times when I am working on stuff like this blog or when I am editing photos. I must admit though, I do still enjoy a bit of YouTube whilst I am eating!

Scrolling is a bit more of an issue for me, especially when I am sat in front of the TV. I have made it a bit of a mission for the new year to try and scroll less and to be more present, and it’s going to take a lot of discipline and/or will-power, but if it gets too much I might try one of those Brick devices that I mentioned at the start of this blog. All of these things will, if I do them, help me to be a little more present, and it might even help my sleep as I won’t be saturated with blue light before I try and get my head down.

Remember, social media isn’t always real. In fact, I would say that it’s largely not true to life, and this is even truer with the advent of AI and the bubble that is continuing to grow. I know I have been using some AI images in this blog, but I think these ones are particularly obvious, (although they do look a little bit like me). I do it because it’s easy and I can get exactly what I need, relatively quickly. There are some very good AI images and videos that have been made by people far better at it than I am, which are really convincing (maybe not the Coca-Cola Christmas advert though!), and you need to be on it if you want to spot them.

To add to this ‘lack of reality’ (or maybe it’s a lack of truth), people only tend to share the good stuff or the exciting stuff. You don’t see the less exciting stuff, you don’t see the events that have happened that are dull or maybe to private to warrant sharing online. Don’t be sucked into thinking that someone has a perfect life - they don’t. No one does. I think people are getting better at sharing more of the less perfect things, but there’s a long way to go with this.

Instagram has moved on a great deal since the days of people uploading pictures of their dinner and it’s not just about photos anymore, in fact, it’s probably less about photos at the present moment and is very much a video-first platform, because that’s what people are more likely to engage with. The sad reality is that if you want to grow and get yourself out there on most platforms these days, you need to be creating and sharing videos.

Get out there, live your life and don’t live yours through someone else’s experiences. You’ll thank yourself for it later.

Final Thoughts

Social media isn’t the enemy. It never really has been. It’s a tool, and like any tool, it’s all about how you use it. Used well, it can inspire you, connect you with like-minded people and help you learn. Used badly, it can quietly eat away at your time, your confidence and your motivation to actually go out and make photographs.

As photographers, we’re naturally drawn to visuals. That’s what makes social media so compelling for us, but it’s also what makes it so dangerous. It’s very easy to convince yourself that scrolling counts as learning, or that watching other people do the thing is the same as doing it yourself. It isn’t. You don’t get better at photography by consuming more photography. You get better by going out, making mistakes, missing shots and occasionally getting something right.

Try to be mindful of how and why you’re using these platforms. Notice when they’re helping and when they’re just filling time. And if you catch yourself stuck in that endless scroll, remember this: every minute spent watching someone else make photographs is a minute you could have spent making your own.

Get out there. Be present. Live the moments you want to photograph, don’t just consume them through a screen. Your photography — and probably your headspace — will be better for it.

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