I echo the feeling about Photoshop – but a little less from the archival perspective, and a little more from the real-time reality-distortion perspective.

http://weblog.terrellrussell.com/2008/11/doubting-what-we-see-as-truth/

As for other people posting pictures – I think we’ll get better as the norms around posting other people’s bad moments become more solidified. It’s rather the wild west at this point…

Regarding your particular moments of hilarity being shared without your pre-consent… perhaps that’s more an issue of the friends you’ve picked :)

Chalfen analyzed the “Kodak Culture” that contains the rules of what we do and do not photograph or film.

Chalfen, Richard. (1987) “Snapshot Versions of Life.” Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Murray talks about how digital photography and photosharing have been changing the rules of Kodak Culture:

Murray, Susan. (2008) “Digital images, photo-sharing, and our shifting notions of everyday aesthetics.” Journal of Visual Culture 7(2): 147-163.

This is echoed by: Heffernan, Virginia. (2008) “Sepia no more: Forget the art school aesthetic. Photo-sharing web sites have their own ideas about beauty.” New York Times Magazine (April 27, 2008): 18.

Batchen has some interesting work on the relationship between photos and memory. He argues that while we commonly claim that we take and view photographs in order to remember events or occasions, the act of photographing selects particular moments to remember. Attention is placed on the photo as a memory-containing object such that the other moments not photographed are forgotten. (This is why I don’t take photos at concerts…)

Batchen, Geoffrey. (2004) “Forget Me Not Photography & Remembrance.” Van Gogh Museum.

I don’t have cites handy, but I remember browsing some stuff in applied cognitive psychology on the generation of false memories from photographs.

As far as the PIM literature goes, the issue of non-identical multiples—the 18 blurry or bad pics you took of your cat before you finally got the good one—is seen as a challenge. As available storage continues to grow, there is less pressure to weed out that which is not “good,” and tools do not make it easy to go through, compare, and weed groups of similar photos (though this seems to be changing).

Anyway, the implication is that many people don’t delete the “bad stuff.” I know I don’t. I try to, but I lose interest or get behind. Also, if I have a blurry or otherwise cruddy image of something, and no other better pics of it, I’ll keep the bad one because it is better than nothing.

Also, the proliferation of image capturing devices means that events are captured from multiple angles by multiple people. No one person has editing power over the images of an occasion. Usually it is only me who will delete the bad pics of me. Other people think they are hilarious or endearing (or useful for later embarrassment). So I feel secure that the world will not be denied crappy pics of me for posterity. ;-p

What seems to worry archivists more than the delete button is Photoshop and its kin. If materials in the archive are supposed to be a record, and we cannot be certain the record has not been tampered with… what does that mean for the archive? Of course, people have been staging and tampering with photos since the beginning of photography, so this is not a new concern—just a growing one as the tools to do it become more mainstream and easier to use.

But… I don’t know… Is the view of ourselves becoming sanitized for future, or will those who come after just think we were better photographers than we actually are? If we delete the photo of the cousin with the frisbee covering his face, and then take a better shot of him playing frisbee, what is lost?

Looking around at snapshots on the web, I’d say that there is so much non-sanitized humanity left in our digital images that there isn’t much to worry about. Go to any personals site and look at the pics (I assume mostly digital) that people use to represent themselves as good-dating material… Oh the humanity….