Most editions of Good Talk will focus on topical communication themes; this one does so, but via a personal cell phone mishap I experienced this summer.

My phone was stolen while I was traveling. After the expected panic about securing personal information, my concerns shifted to two thoughts: the first I would have anticipated, the second I wouldn’t have. Instant thought #1 (expected): “Oh, no! What if I lose all my photos if they’re not in the cloud!” Instant thought #2 (unexpected): “Does it matter anyway? Will I ever go back and look at all the photos in the years and years of photos I have?”

Like everything else they touch in our modern lives, phones have changed our relationship to photos. And though I spend most of my time focused on helping people communicate more effectively with words, my phone pickpocket experience made me reflect on how we communicate with images. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words are they worth if no one ever looks at them?

I found myself musing on what happens with all the photos we take. How many average photos do people have in their phone’s libraries? What percentage of those photos do they ever look at again? What percentage of the total photos in their libraries are a series of 6 or 10 or 25 essentially identical images that were taken “for safety” to ensure at least one is good? Will all those extra facsimiles ever get tidied and deleted? If the pictures are selfies for posting on social media, who are the online friends and family who will ever actually see them, and what will they think when they do? If you’ve spent any time on any beach on any continent this summer, you will undoubtedly have witnessed people taking photos alone, turning the beach into an outdoor photo studio; how many additional minutes of vacation does it take to get a flawless Instagram-worthy selfie?

The causes and connections of our transformed relationships to images by the phone camera are many: social media; digital photos that are free and instant; the ubiquity of phones; and more.

So how can we be intentional when using these devices that have transformed every aspect of our lives, specifically how we take and digest images? Like many things we teach at GK Training, we like to offer our clients highly behavioral suggestions, whenever possible physicalizing the behaviors to help unlock embodied cognition.

Communication is about reaching the other person. So as a tiny, fun way to force an intervention into your life and remind you that photographs too have a “speaker” and “audience,” the next time you’re taking a selfie or having someone do it for you, try this tiny physical and vocal exercise. Point at the phone with your finger and say out loud: 1) the name of the person you hope sees the photo you’re about to take; and 2) a thought you would like them to hear. Notice if too many times what comes out of your mouth has a degree of one-upmanship or even schadenfreude. If so, note the free real estate those feelings are getting in your head and heart. It might be better to put down your phone and pick up that beach-read book!

If what comes out of your mouth are warm and fuzzy feelings about your friends and family, consider doing the following shocking thing. Don’t just send them the image in a text message (which will likely just gum up memory in their text app, or room in their photo library if they import the image) – call that person. Don’t leave a voicemail; they won’t listen anyway. But they will have seen they missed a call from you, and maybe that call will interrupt their beach photo session!