Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post on Age of Twitter lit; “There is much confusion about what, precisely, should vanish in this broad media makeover. Is it print? Or just long stories? Or just bad, boring, dishwater-dull stories? Complicating the situation is that the online world is both increasingly dominant and, for many media organizations, stubbornly unprofitable.” He goes on to say, “The sages say that we’ve reached a situation where “content creation” no longer pays. Only “aggregation” is profitable. It’s a freak variant of Darwinism — the survival of the parasitic. But obviously there will be little of value to aggregate if only rich people and dilettantes can afford to type up their thoughts.” –which I don’t at all agree with, but generally this is one of the better looks at tech-influence literature. (via.)
Video is Justice
I dragged the text file that was Cell Phone Camera Forever out of the trash before posting it last January, because I was second-guessing up to that moment whether it wasn’t too obvious or incoherent. Since then, it is still one of the most popular posts on this website. It seems none of us quite know what to make of our cheap, immediate access to creating media. Does anyone really want, what Momus called, a “1:1 ratio of experience to writing” (replace “writing” with your media of choice)?
A 1:1 ratio of experience to writing means that you’ve become an efficient journalistic machine: nothing you do ever goes to waste. Every single thing you experience gets written about somewhere. It doesn’t have to be experience in the real world; it almost seems like I write, now, about every website I visit too.
I need to revise the ultimate point in that post. A camera can be an interruption, it can create a barrier between you and the moment in your life you mean to be enjoying. Mrs. Tulip give a great example of this:
Two schools I have taught at in the past couple of years ban camera use at their high school musical night. One of the reasons is because students look out to the audience to see if mum and dad are watching. If they see only a sea of lenses instead of adoring eyes they are met with technology rather than soul.
We are obsessed with recording life from our point of view, even when it is only 30 cm from the next person’s POV. The Mona Lisa is photographed by every visitor to the Lourve when we have ready access to pristine images of her taken in optimum lighting etc.
We humans are strange creatures.
But the ubiquity of pocket-size video and point-and-shoot cameras is something we shouldn’t ever take for granted. It brings people to justice.
By now you may have seen the horrific footage of London police assaulting 47-year-old newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson, who was walking home from work by the g20 protests before he was attacked, had a heart attack, and died. (More.) The video was filmed by a bystander who “attended the protests near the Bank of England out of curiosity.”
While there was some whispering on Twitter and message boards that Tomlinson was beaten with a truncheon, until the video was released, his weak heart seemed to suffice as the cause of death.
Most people generally trust that while authorities aren’t angels, they don’t act widely out of character. It just doesn’t make sense that they might beat, to the point of possibly inducing a heart attack, an old man who doesn’t even look like he was protesting anything. Well, now you can see for yourself.
If you are at all interested in the subject of sousveillance for human rights, take a look at WITNESS. The organization was founded in 1992, the year after George Holliday heard commotion outside his apartment and took his brand new camcorder to record police savagely beating Rodney King. The odds of having a camcorder on hand, (let alone at all) were pretty slim fifteen years ago. But today nearly everyone can document an abuse of power as it happens.
[By the way, Massachusetts has an obscenely antiquated law against what it calls "wiretapping," “intended . . . to prohibit all secret recordings by members of the public, including recordings of police officers or other public officials interacting with members of the public, when made without their permission or knowledge.” I believe New Hampshire and Pennsylvania have similar laws. Stupid, unjust, and yet on the books.]
Images from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series.
Update 4/17/09: Very interesting response from William Shaw at RSA’s Arts and Ecology Centre blog: “having met Rodney King a couple of times while I was working in South Central Los Angeles, I wouldn’t envy anyone who becomes part of the info-maelstrom. The film of Rodney King’s beating became a focal point for civil rights activism, but King himself was not a man who ever asked for the attention, who felt tragically responsible for the deaths that happened in the ensuing riots, and who appeared to be just as much a victim of the all attention he had as of that original police assault.”
MeetTheFamous.com, where everyone with a camera and celebrity in site can be paparazzi (and get paid!– $5 for every 1,000 pageviews.) More from WaPo. (via.)
No more worrying about international calling plans while abroad. Skype is rolling out an iPhone app.
Cell Phone Cameras Forever
It seems like everyone had the same thought I had watching President Obama’s speech at the Inaugural Youth Ball last night. Cell phone cameras!!! Whether or not it’s appropriate, (I see nothing wrong with wanting to document “history”) I found myself wondering if any technology might replace the camera now that it is more essential today than television — and constantly with us. I just can’t imagine a world without cameras, no sci-fi scenario where they are replaced with something else now that they are cheap and omnipresent.
We like to remember people and events as static images, framed in our minds. And we want to remember images from precisely the vantage point where we stood at that place that night. Even knowing a million other people captured the same thing and we can search for it on Flickr, on Tweetpic, on anything really — it’s not the same if we didn’t snap it.
What was distressing was no one put the cameras down. It wasn’t a sneaky thing…take one snapshot and it’s back in the bag. No, most of the people there seemed to be observing it all through their viewfinder, which is, oh my god, the most cliched of cliches in modern life.
But what kind of things don’t we photograph? You don’t take a photo of the bride when the priest is about to pronounce you married. You probably didn’t take a photo (you forgot to, didn’t think of it) during nearly all of your happiest memories. Why would you want to interrupt a blissful moment? Distancing yourself from the action taking place and denying yourself the opportunity to experience it with your full attention?
Image from VentureBeat via Ekstasis, who points out cameras are what lighters used to be. Clayton Cubbitt quotes A Clockwork Orange, “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.”
It made me think of an Aldous Huxley essay:
The saddest sight I ever saw was in a Montmartre boite at about 5 o’clock of an autumn morning. At a table in the corner of a hall sat three young American girls, quite unattended, adverturously seeing life for themselves. In front of them, on the table, stood the regulation bottle of champagne; but for preference – perhaps on principle – they were sipping lemonade. The jazz band played on monotonously; the tired drummer nodded on his drums; the saxaphonist yawned into his saxaphone. In couples, in staggering groups, the guests departed. But grimly, indominably, in spite of their fatigue, in spite of the boredom which so clearly expressed itself on their charming and ingenous faces, the three young girls sat on. They were still there when I left at sunrise. What stories I reflected, they would tell when they got home again! And how envious they would make their untravelled friends. “Paris is just wonderful…”
Cameras remind us to feel something, when perhaps we aren’t as much as we would like to be.
Here are two great posts on why Dodgeball died from Caroline McCarthy and Rick Webb, who points out “despite what you will read these days, it did indeed take off at first.” The general problem was, the circa-Friendster network started before people used web and email on their mobile devices. Twitter was lucky enough to catch the smartphone wave. I had about nine friends on Dodgeball in 2004 in DC (where I was living at the time). It was, at face value, perfect as most of us just went to the same five bars anyway and there was a one-in-five chance we’d run into each other on a Saturday night. But, I never felt comfortable mass-SMSing “my network.” It seemed too damn needy and unspecific. The seemingly narcissistic borderline-autistic tendency that people knock Twitter users for is really its saving grace. You can use Twitter without knowing another person on the network. It’s microblogging, not mass-texting service, and that less specific platform allows for more transformative use.
Spin the bottle updated for the digital age (via.)
iPeriod. It isn’t free, but I’m quite delighted to see it exists.
Freak Out Your Friends With Fake Obama VP TXT
New Scientist interviews Jan Chipchase, whose travels around the globe as a design researcher for Nokia have lead to many stunning insights as to how foreign countries use mobile technology. “The common denominator between cultures, regardless of age, gender or context is: keys, money and, if you own one, a mobile phone,” he says, “[It] boils down to survival. Keys provide access to warmth and shelter, money is a very versatile tool that can buy food, transport and so on. A mobile phone, people soon realise, is a great tool for recovering from emergency situations, especially if the first two fail.” He gives an fascinating example of Ugandians using their prepaid mobile cards as a money transfer system, “They would buy prepaid credit in the city, ring up a phone kiosk operator in a village, read out the number associated with that credit so that the kiosk operator could top up their own phone, then ask that the credit be passed on to someone in the village – say, their sister – in cash.”
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