Why does your phone camera make that "camera shutter" sound effect?

If you have a phone manufactured after the year 2010, you know the sound effect that plays when you take a picture. You press the button, and you get an old-fashioned "click-click" that indicates a successful image capture. Sometimes, if you're trying to be sneaky and take a picture of someone cute out in public to show your friends, it backfires on you. This functionality can be turned off, thanks to the convenience of modern technology, but it's near default on every device with a touchscreen these days. Why is that?

Think about it: why would your phone actually make that sound when there's no mechanical function that makes it? Shutters on larger cameras actually do have a sound, but not your phone camera, because there is no shutter - at least, not in the way people usually mean when they're referring to a camera shutter. The shutter is a physical part of the camera that literally does just that: shuts out light, and opens for a split-second to allow light to reach all of the bits that actually capture an image, whether digital or on film (per Nikon). That opening-closing motion is what makes the "click-click" we all associate with a picture being taken. On a phone camera, however, and on some smaller digital cameras, there's a digital version of this same principle that briefly turns off the light sensors in your machine (per Encyclopedia Britannica).

The answer is a word that's hard to pronounce and even harder to spell: skeuomorph.

SKEW-oh-morph. It's a weird word, but a fascinating concept, and one you might be familiar with if you're in design spaces at all. A skeuomorph, in this context, is a feature of some interface or another that was brought into the digital space from non-digital versions, reflecting an aspect of machinery or technology being replaced therein. Specifically, this is usually in reference to things that were a necessary part of the original, either so that they could work or as a function of how they worked - like a camera. Because of how larger cameras work, they make a shutter noise when they take a picture, so that's what your phone does, too. It's why your notepad app on your phone is even called "notepad", and it's why the icon for the actual calling function on your phone is the older style of phone that was physically wired to the main device. You actually do use real-life notepads to write things down, and phones used to look like that, by necessity.

A skeuomorph can also be something, not necessarily digital, that artistically pulls from things in the item being imitated, like pottery made to mimic a woven basket or the tiny handle on maple syrup containers. Pottery can look like basically anything, not necessarily weaving, and the handle on maple syrup containers is a holdover from when the containers were way bigger and actually needed those handles. They're just funny ways that we can watch time pass us by, little microcosms of advancement. Change, captured in a bubble.

It's a bit like one part of a story connecting to the next, to the next, to the next - and, frankly, that's very human. The skeuomorph is one way in which humans demonstrate our stubbornness, even in the face of movement that passes us by, and there's a little bit of beauty in that. There's beauty in knowing who we are and what we've made. So, the next time your phone makes an embarrassingly loud "click-click" sound when you're trying to take a stealthy photo in public, just know that you're not alone - in more ways than one.