Brendan Keogh:

Players can take low quality, low resolution photos full of fake noise. I’m sure some people are grumpy about the poor quality of these images (I’m just annoyed at the need to go through and bypass Rockstar’s terrible social media thing as opposed to saving them directly to the PS3), but I love this replication of everyday photography in a game. For many people, photography is no longer a big deal. You don’t stop and perfectly compose a photo with your expensive camera any more. You pull out a phone, take some snaps, throw a fake filter on it, and throw it on social media. Photography is now fleeting as often as it is permanent.

There’s no doubt that photography has become almost infinitely more accessible thanks to the pervasion of smartphones in today’s society, but fleeting? I’m not so sure.

Just because digital is cheap, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.