Compulsive Clickers

“We’re visiting a museum this evening,” my Korean colleague announced grandly during a recent meeting in Seoul.

“What kind of museum?” I asked, excited at the prospect of perhaps seeing ancient Korean relics.

“That’s a surprise,” she said.

Aha! I thought, we’re going to the National Museum of Korea, known for national treasures like the Pensive Bodhisattva statue and the Gyeongcheonsa Ten-Story Pagoda.

Therefore my disappointment was acute when we entered a building filled entirely with gruesome objects: drawings on the floor, portraits with parts jutting out in an unseemly manner and sculptures in grotesque postures. It is called the Trick Eye Museum, the trick being to place yourself in close juxtaposition to each object and have a picture taken by your companion and then reciprocate the favour by taking their picture. These pictures will capture you doing odd things like picking coins being poured on to the floor by a character in a picture; standing on top of a huge can of Coke; interacting with an animal protruding from the wall; and eating food being offered by some idiot in a portrait. I had myself photographed in a couple of silly situations but on the whole, the Trick Museum left me feeling tricked.

And it got me thinking about the annoying ubiquity of the camera today. A decade ago, we would use the device – if we owned one – sparingly because we knew that each click cost money. We would try to stretch the reel to last the whole vacation, get the photographs developed carefully at our neighbourhood photo studio, store the resulting prints chronologically in a photo album and inflict them on unsuspecting visitors after inviting them home for dinner.

But with the advent of the digital camera, everyone has become a trigger-happy, compulsive photographer. For example, when they go out to eat, people take photographs of themselves entering the restaurant, sitting down, ordering food, eating food, toasting wine, sipping wine and laying the wine glass down. And of course they take photographs of the food itself from different angles.

Later they use these images to make scintillating conversation like this: “We went to this modern Thai restaurant that had the most amazing hexagon-shaped tables. Here, take a look at the table” – they hold the phone towards you – “and pay particular attention to the table mats, also hexagonal. We ordered an outlandish dish of honey-glazed jellyfish with mushrooms in oyster sauce: here’s how it looked. But let me show you a picture of the menu and point out their other outlandish dishes. You will notice here on page 5 – their wine list – that they don’t serve Italian wine, so I ordered this intriguing wine from Chile – here’s the picture…” and so on.

The problem is that it costs people nothing nowadays to take a photograph. All they have to do is buy a digital camera. In fact, they don’t need to buy a separate camera: they can get it free when they buy a mobile phone. Nowadays, they don’t even need to buy a mobile phone: they get it free when they subscribe to a monthly phone plan. And while each call or sms on the phone costs money, each click costs nothing. As a result, I many people use the camera in the phone more often than the phone in the phone.

If you followed the recent London Olympics opening ceremony on television, you would have noticed that the world’s top athletes, instead of savouring the momentous opportunity of parading around a packed stadium with millions of eyes on them, were busy taking photographs of the spectators, who were taking photographs of them. It was a festival of flash bulbs.

And tourists seem to use the camera more often than their own eyes. On a visit to Singapore, my friend walked through Jurong Bird Park without once looking at a bird with his naked eye, relying instead on his camera lens. I questioned him about this.

“I can look at the birds at leisure,” he said, “on my computer screen. It costs me nothing!”

I didn’t point out that it would have cost him even less if he had avoided the Singapore trip altogether and simply typed “images of birds” on Google.