OK Facebook, enough showing off – I want to share

In the best-case scenario, a picture is worth a thousand words. More often, at least in my life, it only tells part of the story.

Case in point, the above photo: a bunch of people gathered around a swimming pool. This picture was snapped about two minutes after my friend C declared his ability to swim two and a half lengths of the pool underwater... and about 45 seconds before he failed spectacularly.

But that isn't the whole story.

What the photo doesn't show is all that was happening outside the frame: someone taking bets for him, someone else hedging against, a third person taking on responsibility for monitoring starts and turns, another giving C some last-minute coaching and another vociferously insisting he'd never make it. Yet those are the bits that made this moment special.

My friends were taking their own pictures, some better and some just different, but unless we go to the trouble of creating a Facebook Group, there's no way to share them – and the collection of stories about them – in a co-authored album.  

Showing off does not equal sharing

My gripe with Facebook's approach to photo 'sharing' is that it's all about showing off . (Actually, my gripe with Facebook in general is that it's all about showing off, but that's a different post.) When you 'share' photos on Facebook, you're not actually sharing anything, in the sense of joint ownership or a collaborative memory multiple people can contribute to. Rather, you're just showcasing your individual take on an experience. There's little to no room for interaction with other around the experience, or to flesh out the experience itself.

The best anyone can hope for, in terms of your fellow experiencers sharing their sides of the story, is a stream of comments attached to the specific photo or the album. But say three people each post a different photo of the same event – where does the storytelling happen? With the current set-up, it's impossible to pull all those strands together. And I think that really stinks.

It's not just about me

I was first rankled by this issue after returning from the holiday depicted above. Come Facebook photo sharing time, my friends and I ended up with six separate albums that catalogued more or less the same events, but were all styled as first-person, limited-omniscient accounts. But the thing about pulling together a story after the fact is that you're no longer limited to your own perspective. You've got hindsight on your side, and the benefit of seeing the full picture, which is usually a much more interesting story. Yet Facebook's technology doesn't support this.

So listen up Zuck – here's what I want

I'm tired of putting my take on things out there in an effort to attract a few witty comments. There's no lasting benefit to that. Rather, I want to create a shared memory that includes everyone's stories. I want the shot reverse shot, the "meanwhile, back at the villa we had no idea what was happening" sidestories and subplots. This is the kind of thing I'll value and revisit. It's also the kind of thing that – I think – would invite more involvement from the people who shared the experience with me in the first place.   

Life doesn't feel like a monologue – so why is Facebook still making us document it that way?