Nice put. You have something much more profound than I've thought about.
Art is always influenced by the tool. In fact, very often, a new tool invented a new art art.
I saw the color photography largely changed the way people thinking about the (B&W) photography. Same from still to motion pictures.
Maybe the spontaneous, Point-and-Shoot-and-Share, PSS, brings back the original purpose of visual art. I assume the original, back to the pre-historic time, the visual art is more for recording than for expression?
I think it's the high bar that prevent everyone to have the luxuary of the spontaneous recording makes it an art. When that bar is lowered, it will be back to its original function. And the importance of the artistic element becomes more tolerable or even ignorable.
I still appreciate some wide spread letters, be it the romance letters between the lovers, or the wisdom passing letters from a father to a son, or a rhetoric letters among the politicians or philosophers. I'm curious to see, 30 years later, what would we have to left to the future generations.
Same curiosity on the photography.