Attention

In 1926, fifty years after Bell’s patent, the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee circulated a set of discussion questions for its study groups. Two of them, verbatim: Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? And: Does the telephone break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends? Read them again and swap the noun. Half a century into the technology — not in its novelty phase, not in the first flush of alarm, but two generations deep, when every household that could afford one had one — serious adults were still convening to ask whether the device was making them lazy and dissolving the family. It is this decade’s discourse with the serial numbers filed off. The only thing that has changed in a hundred years is the object on the table. …

Two days ago, in The Photography That Disappeared, I traced what the smartphone did to the economics of the image—attention diluted, the photograph commodified, the decisive moment traded for burst mode. That essay stayed deliberately clinical, and it closed with a promissory note: at the risk of sounding Freudian, or Jungian, there is a second function of photography that has nothing to do with art, and I would come back for it. This is me coming back for it. …

At a private event not long ago, I lined up what felt like the perfect shot. The light was doing something rare, the composition had assembled itself, and the moment was about to peak. Then, in the same instant, a dozen smartphones rose in front of me. Not out of malice—out of reflex. A wall of glowing rectangles, each capturing the same scene from nearly the same angle, each producing an image that would be indistinguishable from its neighbors. The photograph I was about to take became redundant before it existed. …