Right now the world we live in is fast paced and mainly online. We have ease in being able to take hundreds of pictures and share them with friends and family within seconds. Out of the hundreds of photos taken, sometimes only one or two of them really mean anything. We've begun taking pictures to share instead of making memories in the moment. Have we taken it too far?

Here's a scenario:

You go on Facebook to see one of your friends went to the lake today. They've shared nearly one hundred pictures along with a lengthy message that tells all about what happened that day. You look through the pictures and realize there are pictures of sunrise all the way to sunset. You wonder how your friend managed to keep their phone dry all day. You also wonder why they decided to share their day at the lake with so many people.

There are two ways to interpret this situation.

The first way to look at your friend's story posted on Facebook is that they're attention seeking. You might think, "They had to tell everyone what they're up to so they don't lose anyone's attention", "They're showing off their boat so everyone knows about it", or even "They have to show that they can have a good time so they don't seem so boring". However, these assumptions don't amount to anything.

Thanks to technology we've taken a step forward in how we share our individual stories.

We used to have disposable cameras where we couldn't see the pictures we took until they were developed. We had no idea if they turned out, and we had to wait and see. We also had Polaroid cameras, and we still have them today. These cameras instantly develop and certainly hold a lot of meaning for that. Eventually, we were introduced to digital cameras that captured pictures digitally without film. The pictures are easily stored and deleted making it easier to get the perfect shot. When these cameras were introduced it was very common to get prints of the pictures.

Now that we have the Internet available at our fingertips and we don't have to go on a desktop computer or wait for dial-up Internet, we tend to share online rather than printing out pictures and sending them to others. Although the pictures aren't a physical item that we can hold onto, they can still hold a lot of meaning. We share primarily online and it's very different for those who grew up without the technology. Similarly, scrapbooking was a big hobby for a lot of people to showcase memories. It still is today, but due to the digital age, it has lost a lot of people.

In the end, we cannot let the fact that we used to send physical copies of pictures to our friends to get in the way of how we do now. The little computers we carry in our pockets don't take anything away from us unless we let them. Snapping a few pictures here and there will help memories last. Whether or not we choose to let our phones be a distraction is completely up to us. Our lives are what we make of them, and that is no different from how we've advanced in technology in the past.