Just discovered Flickr. Is this old news? It's pretty cool. Makes me wish I had a digital still camera. This kind of stuff, along with phonecams, fotologs, etc, is really changing the way we as a culture look at images, at representation, at reality. I think I was just reading something by Frederic Jameson about this sort of thing, but he wrote before the internet or digital cameras. He wrote about how just the fact there is this HUGE number of photos of everything being taken everywhere has changed the way we look at the world and at life. Now not only are there tons of photos but theoretically anyone (anyone who can afford to be on the internet, somehow) can look at them, and search them and sort them. Totally insane.
And what's even crazier is that there are people growing up now who may never understand that the world was once not like this. Kind of like the friends I have who have never had a job that's not related to the Internet somehow.
It's also interesting to imagine how technologies like this could be used for activism. What happens when virtually everyone has a camera with them at all times and can snap pics, in a relatively clandestine, easy way, and get them online, of whatever fucked-up shit is happening wherever they are? I am reminded of the excellent "Spiders" web cartoon, which tells an alternate history of the U.S.-Afghan War, one in which Gore is president and tiny camera robots roam Afghanistan, accessible by anyone with an internet connection...
Posted by steev at Noviembre 23, 2004 10:59 AM