The camera as an automated weapon: Sontag's criticism of the addiction of aesthetic consumerism

In the article Aesthetic Consumerism and the Violence of Photography: What Susan Sontag Teaches Us about Visual Culture and the Social Web, Maria Popova delves into a book of Susan Sontag's essays from 1977. What's interesting is not only the prescient nature of her comments, but that they were made long before the acceptance of the influence of "social media" which we now live with.

Despite this, my impression is the connection with photography and "violence" isn't one we usually make. Social media is oppressive, to be sure, and as influential as ever, but would we as a modern pop culture audience go so far as to categorize a camera as an object created for violence and aggression? Isn't the more typical (accepted) view of the camera as a passive observer, (despite the insistence that observance causes change present in the quantum physics camp) and perhaps a crusader in the cases where photography is used to support social justice? Does manipulation of reality always correlate with violence?


(for the excerpted section below, the primary quote is Popova and the inset quote is Sontag.)

"The aggression Sontag sees in this purposeful manipulation of reality through the idealized photographic image applies even more poignantly to the aggressive self-framing we practice as we portray ourselves pictorially on Facebook, Instagram, and the like:

'Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.'

Online, thirty-some years after Sontag’s observation, this aggression precipitates a kind of social media violence of self-assertion — a forcible framing of our identity for presentation, for idealization, for currency in an economy of envy."