REQUEST FOR SUPPORT:
I recently downloaded one of those camera apps that makes you wait a few days before you can access the photos. The delay reminds me to wait to develop photos as a kid and makes the whole process more enjoyable. But am I not supposed to use technology to make things faster and more efficient? Am I deluding myself by trying to somehow live in the past?
-CONCENTRATED
Dear Concentrate—
It’s hard to talk about cameras without also talking about the weather. Photography is an attempt to outsmart the clock and the calendar, an art which, as film critic André Bazin once said, “embalms time, simply saves it from its own corruption.” Even as technology becomes more and more sophisticated, cameras retain some of their ancestral attributes, as if they too were frozen in time. The capture button in your phone’s camera app always makes the mechanical snap of a physical shutter. Filters discolor images and change the color palette, mimicking an aging process to which digital photos are immune.
Having said that, I doubt that sheer nostalgia has made you download this app. If you had wanted to live out the fantasy of living in the past, you could easily have jumped on eBay or headed to a thrift store, those graveyards of analog tech, and picked up an old SLR. I guess the app satisfies a more specific desire, that the wait itself is the main draw.
Most of us, of course, have the opposite instinct. It is well known that people generally go for immediate pleasures, even when the wait costs less or offers a greater reward. This cognitive bias, known in behavioral economics as “hyperbolic actualization”, is so fundamental in human nature that it is dramatized in our earliest myths. (Faced with the choice between an apple and immortality in paradise, Adam and Eve chose the forbidden fruit.) On the contrary, the speed of contemporary life has only further diminished our ability to wait. The one-hour photography boom that coincided with the invention of the mini-lab in the late 1970s is a perfect example of the profitability of impatience for those who know how to exploit it. Customers have shown themselves willing to pay almost twice as much to have their film developed in 60 minutes instead of days. “We live in an instant gratification society,” said one of the first owners of mini-labs The New York Times. “We want things now.”
You strike me, Concentrate, as one of those rare souls capable of monumental self-control, the kind of person who’s willing to forgo the $ 50 offered now in favor of the $ 100 promised later. This is a trait that is undoubtedly useful in many situations, although in the case of the camera app, there is no real virtue in delayed gratification. The reward does not increase over time; you get the same photos. In a sense, your desire to wait is even more irrational than hyperbolic actualization, which has, at least, an evolutionary advantage (those who refuse vital rewards might not live to see more distant ones).
For people like you, the economics and psychology of marketing will be less helpful, I think, than philosophy. Bertrand Russell noted as early as 1930 that the infinite novelties of modern existence could become tiresome. “A life that is too full of excitement is an exhausting life, in which ever stronger stimuli are needed to give the thrill that has become an essential part of the pleasure,” he wrote. Russell believed that instant gratification had eradicated our ability to endure those periods of boredom and idleness that made fun truly enjoyable, just as long winters increase the joy of the onset of spring. We are creatures of the earth, he writes, and “the rhythm of earthly life is slow; autumn and winter are as essential to him as spring and summer, and rest is as essential as movement. The irony is that in cultures that are intensely focused on the ‘now’, promising to respond to any whim instantly (a guarantee echoed in the names of major photo-sharing platforms: Instagram, Flickr), it becomes difficult to really take advantage of the present. , we’re so obsessed with the next entertainment, the next article, the next dopamine shot.
I imagine, Concentrate, that you might feel a bit of that exhaustion. Perhaps choosing to wait for her photos is an attempt to escape the tyranny of pleasure, to free herself from the daily grind of looming novelty, like the eternal scrolling of the newsfeed or the well. bottomless search results, drag on. The speed at which we can now produce and access images comes with its own burden. The duty to immediately scrutinize, edit, and share the photos you’ve taken often prevents you from fully experiencing the moment that was likely beautiful enough to be captured.
Traditionally, even innovations designed to speed up the pace of life have brought with them pockets of unexpected idleness. The hour-long photo lab generated an awkward gap, too short for many errands, which some patrons likely filled while walking around town or strolling through the park to smoke a cigarette. MP3 introduced a five minute download time window (can we ever have waited that long for music?) During which you can write an email or make a cup of coffee. Author Douglas Coupland once wrote about “snacks of time”, “pseudo – recreation – moments that computers create when they stop responding.” Our snacks have gotten leaner over the years, reduced to those fleeting seconds where our gaze wanders away from the screen while waiting for a page to refresh or an app to download, though the respite is still palpable. The beauty of such moments is reminiscent of the relief we feel when a blizzard or rainstorm interrupts life, rendering us powerless, granting us permission to stand still. The delay imposed by your camera app is an attempt to capture and prolong those moments of forced indolence, to “embalm” them, so to speak.
