We’ve seen it before. We’ve done it before, but often, we never really think about it.

Neither did I, until that one time I was hanging out with my roommate, and his friends started laughing at what I took to be nothing in particular.

Ever since I came to college four years ago, I’ve slowly noticed somewhat of a trend. Conversations and pictures have become much more closely linked. Sometimes, you can’t have one without the other.

I can’t even begin to count how many conversations about selfies, Snapchat photos and funny pictures on someone’s phone I’ve heard—and, in some cases, been a part of—during the past couple of years. In some respects, conversations about “that funny picture on her wall” or “dude, look at Matt’s profile picture” were a completely different territory to me when I first started to notice it. Rather than being outright afraid of it, I was simply frustrated that I couldn’t contribute to the conversation or provide insight on the situation.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I’m pretty sure the average Facebook timeline could write several novels. Within the first couple of years of activating a Facebook account, I noticed pages upon pages of statuses with interesting quotes, hilarious stories, witty encounters and the occasional song lyrics. Today, much of that has given way to a virtual mosaic of tagged photos, mobile uploads and changed profile pictures. While I understand that social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest play a huge part in this change, I can’t help but miss the colorful statuses that I saw when I was a freshman. Needless to say, Facebook has gradually lost a bit of its value over the years.

It’s not just conversations and the social scene that’s covered in images from wall to wall. Advertisements are relying more on what you see than what you hear. Pop music artists are well-known for their glamorous music videos. I’ve heard of signs that look like veritable instructional Mona Lisas. Even important documents are turning into giant screenshots. It wouldn’t surprise me if hieroglyphics made a dramatic reappearance one day.

Now here’s the surprising part—I really don’t care, or more appropriately, I’ve decided not to care. It used to bother me that I couldn’t understand what everybody else was seeing. Sometimes, I was convinced that my “visual ineptitude” set me back an incredibly long way. If they started talking about it for minutes on end, I was inclined to ask what they were looking at, thus forcing everyone and their mothers to try and describe it in their own words. But if they don’t know what to say, I’m just wasting their time. If I have to ask, I’m not supposed to know. It’s as simple as that.

At the end of the day, all that agonizing over silly selfies and pointless pictures was, well, silly and pointless. I’ve decided to look at the world through my own perceptions rather than those forged by other people. Besides, I can’t spend the rest of my life hating the things I can’t control, now can I? Ours is a visual world; we all have to adapt—and I’m no exception.

Nick Cocchiarella can be reached at cocc7813@stthomas.edu