Before the age of the smartphone, photographers had to learn how to use high-tech cameras and photographic techniques. Today, with the huge range of camera apps on our smartphones, we’re all good amateur photographers, since the quality of smartphone images now nearly equals that of digital cameras.

The new ease of photography has given us a tremendous appetite for capturing the magical and the ordinary. We are obsessed with documenting everyday moments, whether it’s a shot of our breakfast, our cat or the cat’s breakfast. Even photo journalists are experimenting with mobile phones because their near invisibility makes it easier to capture unguarded moments.

In the past, magazines published unforgettable photos of important people and global events that captured our imaginations. These photos had the power to change public opinion and even the course of history. But if there are fewer memorable images today, it’s not because there are fewer good images. It’s because there are so many, and no one image gets to be special for long.

As people everywhere embrace photography and the media make use of citizen journalists, professional standards appear to be shifting. Before digital images, most people trusted photographs to accurately reflect reality. Today, images can be altered in ways the naked eye might never notice. Photojournalists are trained to accurately represent what they witness. Yet any image can be altered to create an “improved” picture of reality. The average viewer is left with no way to assess the accuracy of an image except through trust in a news organization or photographer.

The question of the accuracy of images gets even trickier when photojournalists start experimenting with camera apps—like Hipstamatic or Instagram—which encourage the use of filters (滤镜). Images can be colored, brightened, faded, and scratched to make photographs more artistic, or to give them an antique look. Photographers using camera apps to cover wars and conflicts have created powerful images—but also controversy. Critics worry that antique-looking photographs romanticize war, while distancing us from those who fight in them.

Yet photography has always been more subjective than we assume. Each picture is a result of a series of decisions—where to stand, what lens to use, what to leave in and what to leave out of the frame. Does altering photographs with camera app filters make them less true? There’s something powerful and exciting about the experiment the digital age has forced upon us. These new tools make it easier to tell our own stories—and they give others the power to do the same. Many members of the media get stuck on the same stories, focusing on elections, governments, wars, and disasters, and in the process, miss out on the less dramatic images of daily life that can be as revealing.

Who knows? Our obsession with documentation and constantly being connected could lead to a dramatic change in our way of being. Perhaps we are witnessing the development of a universal visual language, one that could change the way we related to each other and the world. Of course, as with any language, there will be those who produce poetry and those who make shopping lists.