Are Photographs The New Hoarder's Heaven?

So, not to complain or anything (moi?) but at the last poetry reading by Ernesto Cardinal, in the ruins of an old convent with a view of the volcanoes and the lake, I had what seemed to be a great seat. That is until nearly everyone in the audience held up their ipads, their computers, their phones and silly old fashioned cameras. And they didn't just take a few thousand fotos, many recorded the whole thing. In the good old days, it was a bit of an inconvenience to have flash bulbs going off during a performance, but it is an altogether more irritating experience to have someone holding an ipad in front of your face and a thousand others doing the same.

But that isn't even my major worry. Aside from the appalling rudeness which we have to have become used to, it is the size of the things that presents new bigger issues. Remember the birthdays when the baby blows out the candles and a big loud "Damn, the camera didn't work ." causes the marvelous little moment to be repeated to the confusion of the birthday kid? Pretty rude, if you ask me. I remember class plays and other school performances where the dads with the video cameras obscured the action from half the audience or even interrupted performances. I remember the altar at the Cathedral de Santiago de Campostella where we had been asked to refrain from picture taking because it was a transformative spiritual experience for many and the priests saying the mass were whipping out their phones and taking pictures during communion. Shocker.

But the thing that has been going today is the seemingly idiotic compulsive taking pictures of everything all the time and the fodder that provides for people to have a new compulsive behavior and to hoard in a new dimension. The food in Nicaragua is OK for a very poor country. Fruits and certain veggies are abundant. I have lately been in restaurants with groups of people when, in the middle of conversation, someone starts taking pictures of everyone's dinners. Why would anyone want a picture of my dinner? A bit of compulsive behavior?  What the hell are these pictures for? Who will ever look at them? Why do you need a hundred when one will do? Why does the taking of the commemorative picture over-ride the experience of the event itself?

I grew up in the torturous time of having to watch Uncle So and So's slides of his trip to Europe or trip to Vegas when all the pictures were bad and boring. Now the pictures are much higher quality, but the boring factor is also higher. How many times has someone at a big table wanted to show everyone a picture on their phone and had to scroll through a thousand to find it, then everyone has to get up to take a look? Not cool.

It doesn't seem crazy when it is just one compulsive nut in the room, but watching many such people at the same time sort of brings it home. I suppose soon we will have to make regulations about this just like about texting while driving because we just can't seem to stop ourselves by ourselves.