The latest guidelines issued by the Ministry of Education prohibit unauthorized photographic imaging of students. In today’s world, where so many of us are constantly hooked onto social networks through those ubiquitous devices that were once telephones but are not so much more, such a prohibition may appear coercive, even draconian, and certainly anachronistic. What harm is there in taking photos, when this has so much become a part of everyday life for so many people, particularly the youth we are trying to protect?
In majority of cases, the answer might be “none” — that is, there is no harm done if students take pictures of themselves, their friends, their food, their classrooms or their campus. The impulse to do so — indeed, the appeal of doing so —might be hard to understand for those born before the 90s but that doesn’t make it any less authentic. In an age where old-fashioned written and artistic expression is, if not endangered, then on the ebb, those often self-obsessed photographs of people and things are a powerful form of both self-expression and communication. Posting pictures on interactive sites is shorthand for communication, presumably more meaningful to those who do it than those who stand outside the circle bemusedly observing. But the fact that it doesn’t always appear to “make sense” doesn’t invalidate the impulse or its function. In one way and another, young people are fulfilling the eternal human need to simply reach out, be in contact with one another, communicate and create community. It seems this will go on despite all societal and technological changes, and there is something very heartening in that realization.
Yet I don’t wholly disagree with the prohibition on picture being taken on campuses. There is, of course, the danger that the prohibition will simply incite disobedience. But it is also a worthy attempt to create a place of peace and respite, a setting that is not swept up in the flurry of around the clock technological communication and presence. In some ways, seats of higher learning should embody something of the timeless and universal. The attention should be on taking information in, not the constant process of sending it out that has become the norm since the past decade or so. Students may benefit from being in such a place apart, turning their gaze inward and back before rejoining the rest of the stream of life.
As a matter of interest, maybe we can think back to the relationship that people in the early and mid 1800s had with the camera soon after its invention. There was both fear and fascination. Confronted with the first daguerreotypes and the peculiarly lifelike images they produced, people were naturally convinced that there was something uncanny in it — that the art or science of photography overstepped the laws of the natural world and that it should be approached with utmost care. Almost immediately after that phase came a deluge of photographs, a veritable obsession that led people to photograph even their dead family members in lifelike positions, as though possessed by some compulsion to make them seem to live again. Only slowly over decades did we absorb the technology and make it truly useful in so many facets of life. We may find parallels in our current use of digital devices and the backlash against it.
