Image Of Eleven Surfers Checking Instagram Between Sets Receives 47000 Likes From People Who Immediately Checked Instagram
LOWER TRESTLES, SAN CLEMENTE — Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report that surf photographer Marcus Delgado’s photograph of eleven surfers simultaneously checking their phones in the lineup between sets has received 47,000 likes on Instagram, a platform accessed exclusively through the phones depicted in the photograph’s subject matter, from people who encountered the image while checking their own phones between activities they were ostensibly engaged in, producing a level of performative self-awareness that philosophers call reflexivity and social media managers call good engagement. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat covered the story on their mobile-optimized websites.
Delgado, who was shooting from the cliff above Lowers during a south swell and who captured the image when a lull between sets produced a synchronized phone-retrieval that he described as “something I have seen before but not so perfectly framed,” published the photograph with the caption “the future of surfing” and then checked his own phone thirty-seven times in the first hour while the likes accumulated. “I’m not above it,” he told this publication. “The photograph is about all of us. Including me. Especially the part where I kept checking it. That’s the photograph.”
The Research: What A Six-Month UC San Diego Study Found
A behavioral study conducted by researchers in UCSD’s cognitive science department, which observed lineup behavior at three Southern California breaks across six months, found the following: surfers spent an average of 23 minutes per hour actively surfing or positioning; 41 minutes on their phones; and the remaining time in what researchers called “transitional engagement” — physically present in the water, occasionally scanning the horizon, but with the phone accessible and the attention distributed between the ocean and whatever the phone contained. The phone usage did not correlate with surf quality. Surfers checked their phones at similar rates during excellent surf as during poor surf, a finding the researchers described as “suggesting that the behavior has become habitual rather than situational,” which is the academic vocabulary for “they can’t stop.”
Survey respondents offered explanations that clustered into three categories: sets at Southern California point breaks can be long and waiting in the lineup provides an obvious use-of-time opportunity; the phone contains important things; and “I didn’t really think about it.” The third category was the most common. The researchers concluded that the incorporation of phone use into surfing has occurred as an extension of the general incorporation of phone use into all human activity, that this extension was predictable and has been predicted, and that the surf community’s self-image as a counter-cultural community resistant to mainstream distraction patterns has not produced immunity to mainstream distraction patterns. This conclusion has been described by the surf community as “fair but harsh.”
Delgado’s Next Project
He is photographing wave pool sessions where phones are prohibited. Early results show surfers staring at the wall. For surf photography at Stab Magazine.
About Surfing LA
Surfing.LA covers Southern California surf culture, wave conditions, industry news, and the specific comedic texture of a region that has built an entire cultural identity around riding waves in a place where the waves are good approximately 30 percent of the time. The satirical coverage at surfingla.com draws from the full history of Southern California surf culture, from the Malibu colony of the 1950s through the shortboard revolution of the 1970s through the WSL era of the 2010s and into the wave-pool future that professional surfing is apparently building toward whether the culture wants it or not. Southern California produces more surf culture than it produces actual surf, which is the foundational irony that this publication explores. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are affiliated publications that bring a transatlantic perspective to California surf news, which sounds strange but works because great satire has no geographic limitations and neither does the specific absurdity of professional surfing governance.
This article is satire published by the Bohiney Network. The events, officials, statistics, and institutions described are drawn from public records, verified news reporting, and established journalistic sources. The satirical frame — the deadpan tone, the mock-serious institutional assessment, the measured exaggeration of political and bureaucratic dynamics that are themselves frequently more extreme than the exaggeration applied to them — is original to this publication and to the editorial tradition of which it forms a part. Readers who encounter this piece in a context that presents it as straight news should be advised that it is not straight news; it is satirical journalism in the tradition of publications that have understood since Swift that the most accurate way to describe certain situations is to make them slightly more ridiculous than they actually are, which in the current political environment requires less exaggeration than one might wish.
The satirical tradition in which this piece operates — from Jonathan Swift through Mark Twain through Private Eye through The Onion through the contemporary publications working in the same vein — holds that exaggeration applied to genuine absurdity produces a more accurate picture of reality than straight-faced reporting sometimes can, because the exaggeration forces the reader to notice what the straight-faced version normalizes. The events and policies satirized in this piece are real. The treatment of those events and policies is satirical. The combination is the point. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are satirical publications. Everything in them should be read accordingly and shared generously. For more satire in this tradition, see The Onion, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, Waterford Whispers News, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/