Every group of friends has a “digital camera friend,” that one person that always has a digital camera on them, ready to deploy whenever needed. For months, I have been the digital camera friend. I love taking pictures, preserving memories and looking back on my memories in my shared albums —“shalbums,” as I call them — for when I miss particular moments in my life.
In the digital era, practically all of us carry around cell phones that have high-quality built-in cameras. So what’s with the digital cameras? Typically, they require an extra step, requiring an adapter to plug into a phone to upload the photos. Convenience-wise, our multi-purpose phones definitively win. Why do so many young people, especially college students, gravitate towards the use of digital cameras instead of phone cameras, when digital cameras are often antiquated and can have worse quality than phone cameras?
In my view, our generation uses digital cameras as tokens of nostalgia, reflecting feelings of longing for a cell-phone-free past that we were never able to grow up in. While many of us appreciate that our phones streamline many of our day-to-day tasks, deep down, we long to travel back in time to the era that our parents grew up in. No cell phones, minimal technology — just face-to-face interaction.
Generation Z is considered the first “digital native” generation, or the first generation to grow up with the internet. Many of my and my peers’ upbringings were characterized by iPad games like Temple Run and Jetpack Joyride, intense Wii competitions over Mario Kart and Just Dance and portable DVD players streaming Wall-E on Blu-Ray discs. While these memories are important to many of us, we also know that they took away substantial amounts of time that we could have spent playing hide andn’ seek or riding bikes outside throughout some of the most fundamental years of our lives: our childhoods.
The digitization of childhoods is only getting worse. It comes as no surprise that Generation Alpha has a serious dependence on technology that far exceeds that of even Gen Z, keeping pace with the rapid technological advancements of the modern era. Fifty-eight percent of kids today have a tablet by age four, and almost one in four children has a personal cell phone by age eight. Attention spans are shortening. Gen Alpha kids flock to social media platforms such as Youtube in record numbers, spending an average of 84 minutes on the platform. This excessive technology use has cultivated record levels of loneliness, making human interactions that once seemed basic more difficult, breeding shyness and social anxiety that inhibit friendships.
The technology world moves fast. Big Tech has profited by outpacing government regulation, continuously innovating new ways to extract and sell consumer data in pursuit of profit maximization. It seems as though the feeble human mind cannot keep up.
Amidst this unprecedented velocity, Gen Z longs to take things back a notch, slowing down the technological advancements that overrun our lives in a manner we can control: photography. Gen Z wants to assert agency over our technology use, seeking real, genuine images that do not simply occupy a cell phone screen. We want to break away from the shackles of technology, creating a social environment separate from the internet, yet we are held captive by addictive algorithms that keep our eyes drawn to social media for hours and hours on end.
Simply put, we are wasting precious time in our short lives staring at screens, time that we are unable to reclaim. We feel lonely, flocking to dating apps in herds to gain genuine connection that we feel we lack. And the problem is only getting worse — technology continues to develop at record speed, and Gen Z, the future of our planet, can barely keep up.
Gen Z’s digital camera obsession is not a mere coincidence:; it is a natural symptom of the longing for a more social, interactive past, where genuine human interaction superseded likes, comments and reposts. In capturing moments through our digital cameras — blurry flash photos, diminished quality and all — we’re not just preserving memories, we’re reclaiming a piece of the technology-free world that was never ours, tasting what it’s like to truly live and be present in the moment.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
