The Most Dangerous Game (21st Century)

While filming, re-filming, and editing, my NHS speech video, I realized it is certainly impossible to capture every living moment. Especially in a transitioning age from Polaroids to digital media, pictures are becoming less permanent and easily re-doable. Sontag's claim "that photography limits our understanding of the world" is true; photography and film, for better or for worse, distort reality by glamorizing life as it is for aesthetic pleasure or personal validation. The development of various social media platforms reinforces these bad habits.
Through the lens of just one camera, we only ever attempt to capture the highlights of life, and apps like Snapchat allow us to broadcast those moments in 10 second clips. The reality our friends and ourselves come to know become disillusioned by disjointed streams of filtered snippets. This is, indeed, "the opposite of understanding" if what is accepted as true has only been reached through several takes. To satisfy less immediate needs for attention, Instagram allows us to display our life in grids of square pictures. An underlying motivation keeps us coming back to Instagram and perpetuates a cycle of "aesthetic consumerism": the hunt for likes. This most dangerous game quantifies the quality of life through the number of likes and people reached.

Others may argue that photographs bring about a degree of reality; take photographs of Syria, for example. True, the destruction and terror is visually displayed, but the constant exposure desensitizes society to the harsh reality and creates a humanistic barrier; we can't smell the blood, can't hear the bombs and subsequent cries, can't taste the ash, and can't feel the scorching heat of the constant shelling.
Photographs create a reality guarded by facades and forced smiles: say cheese!