Scrolling through any social media platform presents you with a mind-numbing series of photos of the same scene from the same place in the same light and processed through the same filter. They seem to have been taken merely to post to the internet in the hopes of garnering likes, or whatever counts as social affirmation. It is easy to see the parade of nearly identical images as evidence of some character flaw and broad societal decay.
But imitation is not always as hollow as the copying of social media posts might suggest. Artists of all sorts learn their art by trying to reproduce versions that previous and usually better artists created. In many artistic pursuits, learning is a process of producing more and more faithfully your own version of some work. Only after countless examples of bad reproductions does a person develop enough skill to add originality to the work. Music is the obvious example. Every musician plays the same well-worn pieces over and over and over again. Similarly in the visual arts, e.g., painting and drawing, younger artists often develop their skills by trying to reproduce a master’s work.
Even in photography imitation can be a valuable exercise. Studying the work of a previous photographer whom you admire to determine what makes it so compelling. Trying to recreate your own version of an image, trying to recreate the lighting or the angle, can help you develop a better sense of how light and perspective shape a photograph. Do it enough and you can begin to develop your own style and sensibilities, applying what you’ve learned to new scenes.
So maybe imitation per se is not the problem, but the reasons and goals that animate the imitation. In that case the problem with the endless stream of identical images on social media is not the soporific monotony, but the fact that the hoards of people posting those images have no desire to learn from them. They are imitating merely to imitate.
Or maybe, just maybe, there is no problem with that stream of identical images. If it bothers you, rather than scrolling through your social media feed, go take some pictures.