In screenshots we trust

The other day I got the shock of my life.

A post popped up on Instagram claiming that, henceforth, anyone who took a screen-capture of someone else’s post, that person would receive a notification.

Luckily, it was not true. But for a few terrifying moments, my heart stopped.

Screenshots are probably one of the best things ever invented. It allows us to lurk online and comment from the sidelines without alerting anyone. In Bengali, there is a popular phrase — PNPC or poro ninda poro chorcha, basically gossiping and complaining about others and dissecting their flaws. The screenshot is its digital manifestation, one picture worth a thousand PNPC words.

Big brother and private sphere

Honestly, screenshots are what keeps us sane in this troubled world where the nanny state is constantly trying to tell you what to think and monitors what you say. After the controversy around the film Satluj, one hears the government is planning to bring OTT films under CBFC certification norms. India already ranks 24th out of 33 countries surveyed by the U.S.-based think tank The Future of Free Speech. X (erstwhile Twitter) has already geo-blocked consensual sexual content from its platform, not just handles accused of peddling child pornography or misusing the Grok AI bot.

It’s not just in India. The U.S. requires most visa applicants to disclose social media handles and usernames used in the last five years for vetting, while some applicants are instructed to make their profiles public for consular reviews.

It seems the private sphere is ever shrinking, besieged from all sides, with our digital and physical lives constantly monitored, ostensibly for our own well-being. Government agencies everywhere require us to reveal more and more of our private information. Companies surveil us to know what ads to show us. The screenshot, oddly, is one way to retain control over the private without feeling monitored and judged by the world at large.

In an essay for The New York Times Magazine, Clio Chang wrote “in many ways, screenshots are like your nudes: personal and deployed for a select audience.” Ironically, or perhaps aptly, the first known “screenshot” was from 1959, a Polaroid photograph of a U.S. military computer screen displaying a pin-up model. That Polaroid, in retrospect, was essentially a screenshot.

There was even a device called the NPC Screenshooter, which used a Polaroid camera housed in a light-tight hood, and was advertised as the “simplest and most economical way to make photographs and slides directly from your computer’s monitor.” By 1960, digital techniques to take a screen-capture had been developed. By the 1980s, IBM PC keyboards came with a Print Screen key and the term “screenshot” had entered the computing lexicon. Now, smartphones are making it even easier to screenshot things we want to make a note of.

Making information portable

But it was only in that moment of panic when I thought my screenshots would no longer be quite so private that I realised what screenshots really mean. It’s not just about making snide comments on people’s posts without letting them know; though, of course, there is unadulterated glee in that. But as Chang points out in the same essay, screenshots, rather than the photo gallery, tell the story of who we really are. Photos, Chang wrote, “are often poised and polished” and, therefore, have a “sense of exteriority to them”. A traditional diary cannot keep up with the breakneck pace of the world around us. Screenshots reflect our true messy, smutty selves in all their glorious pettiness. We save screenshots of moments of joy (that first Queen Bee accomplishment in The New York Times Spelling Bee), humiliation, outrage, schadenfreude, and restaurants we hope to try. In our screenshots folder, we can truly say, all are naked in the hamaam. And the great power of a screenshot is that it does not just document an event. It allows us to make information portable, share it with a new audience, embellish it with an eye roll, all without anyone being the wiser.

That is why screenshots remain one of the last bastions of freedom. As it is we have all inadvertently forwarded that screenshot to the very person who made the post instead of the friend we intended to send it to. If that poster was routinely notified that would be the end of the game. “I will have to get a second phone and take a picture of the post instead of a screenshot,” sighed a member of my “morning screenshot” WhatsApp group. It gives one hope that there is always a jugaad way out of this surveillance. But for now, screenshots are safe.

In a world where screens have taken over our lives, the screenshot is our reminder that we can still have the last word. 

The writer is the author of Don’t Let Him Know, and likes to let everyone know about his opinions, whether asked or not.