Posting photos online is not living. You are producing your own obituary | Rana Dasgupta

As you point your phone at everything from Notre Dame to a slice of chocolate cake, remember these images will take on significance only after you have gone

Summer begins again. Millions of people are packing their bags to get away from it all. Their eyes are ready for fresh sights: sun-drenched beaches, famous museums, parasolled cafes.

More eyes than ever before will, however, see nothing fresher than the screens of their own smartphones. They will not need to look at sunsets and palm trees, for they will have flawless copies on their devices (click!). The great scale of the Notre Dame cathedral, in Paris, or the Colosseum, in Rome, will bring no risk of eyestrain: they will be able to see the grandeur of these sites in harmless digital miniature (click!). Screens will give them their own versions of the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh's Sunflowers, versions that have this significant advantage over the originals: they can be owned, stored and used as material for a personal online story.

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