In a non-confrontational way, truth is photgraphers (I mean members of the public rather than pros) are more than ever ready to fire off frame after frame after frame in the hope that some will be usable - 99% are truly thrown-away. Pros, OK, fashion / sports, always did take hundreds ... the special something in just one ... but also the reality that the cost of film was trivial compared to the cost of the shoot ...
People shooting on assignment have always had the ability to shoot thousands, tens of thousands of shots, to edit down to a very small number. National Geographic, for example, selects from 300 to 1000 *rolls* of images for a typical assignment. This might be edited down to fifteen shots.
What I don't understand is why anyone would think that this is a bad thing for someone who is not a working professional. Is there some badge of honor because someone produces one great shot from 100? I doubt it - nobody is looking at the ones that are thrown away except the photographer.
This is the history of photography. In the beginning, there was only one image. When a positive/negative process was introduced, photographers didn't get up in arms and whine about the ability to try to make a good print over and over from a negative. When roll film became available, and photographers could shoot ten images of the same shot instead of one or two, would it be a good thing if apoplectic photographers used to those one or two shots were able to stop roll film? How about 35mm? All of a sudden, someone could shoot 36 snaps in a row without stopping. Was that a terrible thing? Has the world suffered from 36 exposure rolls that all of a sudden allowed those 10,000 shot assignments? And the minilab. How many would like to suggest that labs that give photos back in a day or an hour instead of a few weeks are a bad thing?
Digital is just part of this ongoing process. In a few years, the argument that digital lets people shoot "too much" will sit in the waste bin with all the other ideas that exist solely to preserve an existing paradigm.
Jeff Spirer
Photos: http://www.spirer.com
One People: http://www.onepeople.com/
Surfaces and Marks: http://www.withoutgrass.com
