SAN FRANCISCO — The image of a bright-eyed cat with many online lives peers out from a hole in the wall as you enter the new exhibition “Snap+Share” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

You might wonder if the museum has designed a show for the sake of Instagram or Facebook likes. The cat-in-hole is a recognizable internet meme, while the show’s title is itself a clear play on Snapchat, the messaging and photo-sharing app. And the museum, a short walk from Twitter headquarters, is actively competing with other cultural institutions to reach the local technology community, for both funding and audience.

But the exhibition offers more than opportunities for selfies (there are two or three) . Clément Chéroux, the museum’s senior photography curator (who said he received no financial support from the industry), is exploring how the transmission of images has evolved from analog to digital times. In particular, he makes a compelling argument for the serious art-historical lineage of social media photo sharing.

The show questions the common mythology that the internet has radically changed the way we share pictures of ourselves, our pets and our vacations, and created “an entirely new kind of dialogue,” as the technology reporter Nick Bilton wrote. Instead, it proposes that the roots for this kind of sharing came decades earlier, making for an evolution, not a revolution.