Before the advent of digital cameras, there were two kinds of social photographer. Casual dilettantes like me would occasionally whip out a camera to take snaps at a family gathering, or when seeing old friends, but would rarely bother to get the films developed. When I did, the results weren't very impressive as I didn't use the camera enough to know what I was doing.

The second and more impressive group of dedicated amateurs were intimidating, organised, technically skilled extroverts who took it upon themselves to document comprehensively social gatherings, get prints made at some expense, and then send copies to everyone who was their. At home they had lots of photo albums stuffed to the gills, and you went to them if you were feeling sentimental or were trying to track down an image. They were the social historians of their day.

Now everyone's at it all the time, and cameras appear whenever people do. It was distinctly odd to realise that for the twentysomethings I used to work with, photography had become an absolutely integral part of coming together socially: the evening was recorded as it happened, and then next day photographs were analysed online, via e-mail or Facebook, as a matter of course. This was true not just for weddings and reunions, but for the most casual social hook-ups, and created a sort of Truman Show, Big Brother experience of watching each other watch each other. Any sense of the meaning of photography as marking out the special or the unusual has gone because the nature of the underlying technology has shifted irrevocably towards the ubiquitous and the casual.

In some ways we've only begun to scratch the surface of using digital images as a tool for getting things done in everyday life. I have an old Apple laptop which I want to resurrect, but it's missing a few keys. I Googled my problem and found a guy in America who sells replacement keys, got into an e-mail exchange, and ended up sending him some pictures of the keyboard so he could make sure he had the right parts. The whole thing took seconds – the camera and USB cable happened to be connected to my PC, and by some miracle the camera was both fully charged and had some memory left (you know, like in a movie!) and in seconds, we'd solved a problem which would have been incredibly hard to do quickly any other way. As this gets easier to do, we'll do more of it – holding up our video phones to shop windows, using them as the remote eyes of our partners to say, “This one? Or that one?” In theory you can do those things now, but in practice they're a pain. They'll get easier.

A few years ago my partner and I had a photography amnesty, and went around the house tracking down all the rolls of undeveloped, old-school analogue film we'd been too lazy to deal with. We were able to fill a pillow case with the results. We took to them to a local photo shop and got the whole bag developed at ruinous expense, (judging from the shopkeeper's amused comments it was a process he'd clearly seen before.) The results were satisfying, if somewhat dangerous to marital harmony: (exactly when were these pictures of you kissing random strangers taken?) but they also marked the end of our analog film era. Those days are gone.

There will still be prints. Modern photo printers and online print development services are very good, but the reality is we're always going to store more images than we can afford or be bothered to print, which means we are now all digital photo archivists. Instead of having mysterious rolls of undeveloped film, we have thousands of unprinted digital photographs. These have an irritatingly elusive quality, because there are some wonderful pictures there, but they are exactly where you don't want them to be when you're feeling warm and fuzzy: at a computer.

It's fun to sync up a PC to the TV or set up a laptop on a shelf and do a slide show, but it's also a bit of a palaver, and it doesn't afford the rummaging surprise of going through an old shoebox of prints and negatives, where the battered paper containers or black and white stills cue you to the age and possible significance of what you've found. A digital photograph feels as old as the computer you're displaying it on.

After much harassment I've finally got the whole lot backed up on to an external hard-drive, which means that when the house burns down that's the thing I have to go grab: who knew database back-up could be such an emotive issue? And I'm not knocking the digital photo revolution when it comes to family memories. The reality is that digital photography means that the early life of my poor son has been more exhaustively documented than that of the royal children of pretty much any previous civilisation. And in fact, when I'm lying on my deathbed and I hand him a terabyte USB stick containing copies of the family's digital photo archive, I'm sure it'll be a Kodak moment.

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Michael Parsons helped to launch The Industry Standard magazine, and was the launch Editor of CNET.co.uk

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