Hey, you know what's not actually a new thing and that people can all stop going crazy about? Having a phone on your camera. I mean, my phone cost £11.99 and it's got a fucking camera on it. Getting excited about having a phone on your camera is a bit like getting excited about having a takeaway coffee or playing a song off your laptop. It ain't no thing.
Still, half the adverts I see on TV are for cameras and phones with cameras on them. There's usually a smiling mum photographing her snowboarding child in the ultra zoom and capturing their soul in a Twitpic forever, and we're all being told we should be doing this. We're told that life is passing us by and that if we don't take pictures of every banal moment in our lives – like Guy Peace in Memento – these moments will be lost to us forever. It's like we're being told not to trust our own memories.
We're not just being encouraged to be the official club photographers of our own existences, either – we're also being told that we should be documenting every meal as if we were preparing for a retrospective at the Saatchi gallery. This idea finds its epitome and is perpetuated most fervently by something called Instagram. You might have heard of it.
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