I recently attended a wedding anniversary celebration for friends, a Chinese-American couple who held their party in a beautiful scenic spot in southern China. As the sun shone down on the mountains and glasses clinked, I thought about how lucky we all were to be here together, in this lovely spot and at this perfect time.

But as I looked around, I noticed that many of the guests didn't seem to be enjoying the event. Instead of appreciating the beauty of our surroundings, they were busy adjusting the digital filters on their phones, shifting their selfie sticks, or framing their friends and tidying their hair, all in their quest to take the perfect shot. They were more interesting in creating a photo of their experience than in the experience itself.

I had the same experience when traveling as part of a group tour to Japan. The older people in our group, like myself, were just happy to see the beautiful temples and glorious mountains. The younger people, in contrast, seemed to treat the country as nothing more than a pretty backdrop to take great photos of themselves. For every picture we oldsters took, they took a hundred.

Back in the 1980s, Japanese tourists used to be mocked for the incessant clicking of their cameras at famous sites. Now that's spread throughout our culture, both in China and the West, where tourism and photos now go together.

If you go to a tourist spot, more people are looking at the site through a lens than through their own eyes. And at least they're looking at something; half the people there usually seem to be taking pictures of themselves.

I understand the desire to have a memento. But when it consumes all the time spent at a celebration or a trip, when the desire to take photographs overrides the joy of travel or time with family, that's not a memento but an obsessive compulsion.

What caused this photo-mania? It isn't just the new ubiquity of cameras in every pocket - it's the arrival of social media in which pictures are displayed like currency.

I'm not immune to this. Even though I'm only on a couple of sites, I've known the strange buzz that getting lots of "Likes" brings. We display our own images like trophies seized from the battlefield, hungry for the praise that our "friends" - most of whom we barely know - will offer us.

Yet the image is not reality. We offer up our holiday shots in the hope that our "friends" will think our whole life is like this, carefully cultivating our own online image like courtiers garbing themselves in expensive finery. We don't take pictures of our own mundane lives, but of imaginary glamour.

The irony is that by reducing these genuinely spectacular or joyful moments to an image, we forget what their real value is.

I remember the first trip I took abroad with an intensity that no picture can reproduce, even though there was no social media to post it on and the only picture I have of it is a grainy Polaroid of a restaurant wall.

But maybe technology itself will save us from the plague of shutterbugs. Digital technology and augmented reality is advancing quickly, and soon we'll be able to place our own image against almost any background we want, from the Great Pyramids to the surface of the sun.

Perhaps then the desire to treat nature or history as scalps for the camera will disappear, and people will go back to see sites for their own sake. 

The author is a commentator on current affairs. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn