Sharing A Memory For Social Status

This great photo taken by Dave Bullock for Wired of a gig at Coachella got us thinking. Quite a party – but when you look deeper, there appears to be a lot of people taking photos in the audience. It’s not hard to be reminded of camera-wielding tourists who arrive at an attraction and spend more time looking through a lens at the attraction than looking at it directly and taking it.

In similar ways, these music fans seem to be recording a memory that they never really experience. They’re too busy taking that shot to actually be there in the moment.

And the reason? Like the tourist, they want to share. But today they share that memory instantly via email and MMS to their friends on Facebook or readers of their blog. They share so that other people can see the photo of a moment that they actually didn’t see. And the motivation? For social status: to bolster the image their friends and network have of them.

So in summary: these folks are taking photos of moments in order to share those moments with others in order to gain status for having experienced a moment they never really had.