Cameraphones and disposable memories

Doug Rushkoff gets what John Dvorak doesn't get — that the whole point of taking pictures with cameraphones is that the photos are ephemeral and frivolous and spontaneous:

The cameraphone is terrific in that it gives us the ability to snag a photo whenever we want, even if we never carried a camera around, before. They certainly don't cost us anything in weight, and given how we already keep our phones in the most accessible pockets we've got, it costs us almost nothing in time to click off a few shots. And here we are passing digital photos around to one another like they were email signatures - moblogging them onto our websites or just passing our phones physically around our classrooms and workplaces to share the accident or sexy person we happened to capture.

But that's just the point: it's the photo we happened to capture. Instead of elevating the events in our lives to "memories," as we did in the Kodak era, we are simply grabbing some visual data points or a momentary sensation. The intentionality is gone. And unless the image is spectacular (not in execution, but in its content) we'll trash it without printing. Who can be bothered filing all those little jpegs?