A picture may not necessarily be worth a thousand words, but it’s almost always worth more than 140 characters. Consider these stats. We share 45 million photos a day on Instagram and 100 billion a year on Facebook. And as the NYT’s Nick Bilton explains, we now use photos as a form of dialogue. Show, don’t tell, has been taken to the extreme. “It’s a shift that appears to be coming at the expense of the last big thing. Images sent between cellphones are on the rise as text messages continue to fall.” Photo sharing is the new talking, and we can’t shut up.

+ The surge in shared photos probably provides some benefit to the recipient. But I worry that it can actually harm the experience of the sender. We no longer take any time to create an internal memory of an event or an experience before seeing, filtering, and sharing a digital version of it. We remember the photo, not the moment. I updated a post on this topic and published it on Medium: This is You on Smiles – We All Have Photographic Memories Now.