The Flattening Effect of Facebook Photos

So you take a European vacation or some such, and you post pics afterwords of all the iconic shots: Stonehenge, Big Ben, the Louvre's glass pyramid, your arms outstretched like you're holding up the Leaning Tower...and your lunch.  That's right, you have your lunch, long eaten and forgotten, sandwiched between Versailles and the Colosseum.  And when one later clicks through your facebook album, the most famous structures on Earth are given the same face time as your spaghetti.

Suddenly, the Notre Dame cathedral that took over a century to complete is no different than a pasta some bored French chef threw together in 15 minutes for the tourists; the Eiffel Tower is now on par with a chicken breast; and the Vatican, that centuries-old seat of power and home to some of mankind's greatest art, is given no greater due than a gellato that melted before you finished it.

This is the peculiar flattening effect of facebook photos: there is no inherent hierarchy, no clear separation between the ephemeral and the eternal, between the silly and the sublime, for all is functionally equal on a web-browser. 

This can be a problem; for example, when I lived in Utah, I occasionally saw facebook pics of summit-climbs to Mt. Olympus, and those by the same people who posted pics of Ensign Peak's mere 20-minute trail, or of City Creek mall, or of a giant sandwich.  Unconsciously, hiking Mt. Olympus became equivalent in my mind to mall-walking or eating a foot-long.  So, when I did finally tackle Mt. Oly, I was grossly unprepared psychologically for that punishing ascent.

And when I at last crested the peak on that last wearying rock-scramble to the top, I finally realized that when people post pics of themselves a-top Mt. Oly, they were in fact bragging--and justly so!  But the facebook pics hadn't communicated the immensity of that mountain--facebook photos have this strange leveling effect, of making the highest achievements and the most mundane minutiae feel the same.  On facebook, graduating college is no bigger (or lower) a deal than Friday night drinks; pics of weddings and funny cats read the same; a cancer-scare and a paper-cut both get "liked". 

I don't post nearly as many pictures as I used to.