Stop living your life through your phone screen

So this is probably a somewhat contradictory article, but I’m pretty certain that it’s one that matters, right? Just about everyone somehow has access to the internet at any given time, no-matter where they are in the world. Which in turn means that the vast majority of those individuals are probably using the internet to update their social media.

Now don’t get me wrong, I use social media myself, Instagram is the one for me. Personally, I enjoy taking photos of the people I love and documenting the things I’m doing through the medium of photography. However there seems to be a very fine line between documenting what you do with your life and going out of your way to find things that look good on your social media feeds.

I think the biggest example of this is gigs / festivals. When you go to a gig now it’s just a sea of mobile phone flashes and countless Snapchat recordings. The last gig I went to was The 1975 in Newcastle and Matt did a little speech about this very subject, he kindly asked people to stop watching the gig through their phone screen for just one song. Did people listen? The majority did, but there’s always that small minority of people that refuse to just take step back from their Snapchat story and couldn’t pocket their phone for ~4 minutes. When you think about that, it’s kind of sad.

In 2017, just about everyone has access to a camera but nobody has real photos photos. Now I know how ridiculous that sounds but hear me out. Remember when you were a kid and you could spend hours just looking through old photo albums? In a few years people are going to be saying “Photo albums? What are those?”. I shoot quite a lot of film so I feel like I have an opinion on this. It aggravates me that people spend so much time taking photos on their phones and uploading them to social media but then that’s it. After that they’re completely forgotten about and never seen again until they’re deleted to make space for the next haul of pointless selfies in the club.

I’ll freely admit that at the time of writing this article I’ve sat alone at my desk and sank several bottles of beer, however I’m sure that many people can agree with the points that I’ve made. We do things in our lives not to make us happy but to increase our social media following. We’ve all become victims of it without even realising it.

I guess the point I’m trying to make here is just every once in a while, put your phone away somewhere and enjoy the moment that you’re living in. Make memories, not Snapchat stories.