
In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing - bootload
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/in-the-future-we-will-photograph-everything-and-look-at-nothing
======
bjshepard
“Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the
most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country
around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed
through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST
PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the
site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked
along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and
photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses,
filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides-pictures of the barn
taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the
photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling
some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long
silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes
impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras
left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. "We're not here to capture
an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura.
Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

Excerpt From: Don DeLillo. “White Noise.” (published in 1985!)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I was with him until the pseudo-babble about auras and energy.

And it occurs to me: that situation was self-selected for those people. See,
some folks are not really capable of the perception effort required to really
look at something. To experience it fully. But they _can_ buy a camera.

Just go somewhere else. They apparently travelled through wonderful
countryside to get there - just stop! Barns are not rare, and many are made on
the same plan.

~~~
coldtea
The words "auras" and "energies" here have nothing to do with pseudo-babble,
new age-ism or whatever.

It's just a quite standard poetic / descriptive use of the word, in fact the
term "aura" is used in its most common literal meaning -- those photographs of
"the most photographed barn in the world" maintain its myth and it's allure.
That's what he means with "auras" there.

> _And it occurs to me: that situation was self-selected for those people.
> See, some folks are not really capable of the perception effort required to
> really look at something. To experience it fully. But they can buy a
> camera._

The idea behind the passage what that those "some folks" are increasing, or
even the majority.

It's not about there not still being other people who can appreciate the
things they see.

------
asoplata
The last time I was at a crowded museum I spent roughly 20% of the time just
trying to avoid getting in the way of people taking pictures. Everyone was
taking pictures everywhere of all the installations. I considered doing so
too, but realized 20 years too late that there are far better photographs of a
work of art (or at least enough) by professional photographers with different
takes/interpretations than I could do without decades of training (on
average). If you like a piece, there's nothing to stop you from buying a print
or downloading a picture. I get it that some people do it more for remembering
"that time I saw it in person" instead of trying to capture the essence of a
piece, and that's fine (that's why I used to take the pictures), but multiply
the amount of time it takes to do that by every piece you come across, plus
how much posting it on instagram/whatever/facebook removes you from "the
zone", and I think it's just a different way of massively disrupting your
attention when the MAIN reason you're there in a museum, for a limited amount
of time, is to suck it all up. I'm sure many people don't get distracted by
trying to take photos of all the art, but once I stopped and just focused on
concentrating and nothing else, a trip became much, much more enjoyable, and
even memorable.

~~~
DerKommissar
I went to the Louvre last year a few days after Christmas which I assume is
not tourist season (first time in Paris). It was packed, and the Mona Lisa was
surrounded by a sea of people 10 feet thick, most of them waving their phones
around in the air on selfie sticks.

~~~
skywhopper
I think it's like this all the time. There's a reason they put it in a dead
end hallway. The worst for me in this vein was going to Versailles, and being
there at the same time as a big tour group of people, seemingly all of whom
had a digital camera, an SLR, and a camcorder (this was in 2004...), and all
of whom had to capture every significant artifact in each room and then move
on. None of them were looking at the things except through their cameras'
lenses and screens. There were so many of them that they made the tour pretty
miserable for the rest of us.

------
allan_s
In a way, I also take a lote of notes that I never read back, but the actual
process of taking the time to write it makes it easier to remember.

If it works the way, when you take a photo, even if you don't look it back,
the fact that you did take the time to photograph a moment may ease to
remember it.

just my 2 cents of pseudo-science

~~~
trelltron
I think writing notes helps us remember things because we're concentrating on
the information being recorded, and because in order to record it we are
forced to create a well structured representation of that information which
will also be easily remembered.

However, when I take a picture, I'm mostly concentrating on the camera and the
spacial aspect of what I am photographing (getting it into frame), which
doesn't help me remember any of the details, which are the genuinely important
bit.

I do like your explanation though. I wouldn't be surprised if people who are
more (for lack of a better word) artistic than myself, focus more on the
details as part of the photo-taking process, and so retain those details
better.

------
InclinedPlane
It's never been any different, that's how people are. What's different is that
in periods of technological change people will engage in new behaviors which
are then unfamiliar to us. So we take notice of them and realize that there
are a lot of problematic aspects to culture and society. Oh golly gosh, people
spend so much of their lives just stumbling through, unthinking, sometimes
unfeeling. Anyone who has spent any time studying mindfulness is well aware of
how pervasive that mode of living is for all people for most of their lives.
It's not that we are automatons, it's just that we are creatures of habit and
imitation and we find it very difficult to be truly individualistic. It often
takes a great amount of training to be routinely "present" and mindful in
every day life.

Let us remember the era that has just passed not so long ago prior to the
advent of smart phones and prior even to the widespread popularity of the
internet. An era when many people in the developed world would digest "the
news" from only one local source and be satisfied with whatever they got fed.
An era when most people would spend half their non-working waking hours
watching whatever was on one of a few channels on television.

Yes, people should live their lives a bit more thoughtfully. Yes, people
shouldn't be so caught up in all the trappings of documenting and effectively
"scoring" their lives via smart phones and social media. But at the same time
it's difficult to make the case that this is a decline. This is just
different. And compared to people living passive, purely consumptive lives
filled with monotony and vast sameness, it's hard to complain. People are
doing things, experiencing things, and sharing their lives with their friends.
That they are not doing it in the maximally best way is a complaint people
could make about any generation in any era. And it's not as though people are
wasting their lives in worse ways or to a higher degree than they were before,
but merely that we'd grown accustomed to the old ways of doing so, and
mentally swept them under the carpet.

------
ommunist
The author gets it wrong. In the future you only will be allowed to take shot
if your camera gets location-based DMCA authorisation clearance to take it. It
will be blocked at all other times, and there will be pay per view from camera
producer for displaying shots that were already taken, automatically sending
money to copyright administration agency.

~~~
m52go
Yeah it's disgusting. Witness the fight to copyright architecture, so that
folks must ask for permission to take photos of public buildings.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_the_United_States)

~~~
aethos
I'm not sure if I follow. Could you point me to the section you are referring
to? All I found was this, which seems quite positive.

"First, when a building is ordinarily visible from a public place, its
protection as an "architectural work" does not include the right to prevent
the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, photographs, or other
pictorial representations of the work.[13] Thus, the architect will not be
able to prevent people from taking photographs or otherwise producing
pictorial representations of the building. "

~~~
m52go
The bit you found is reasonable, but there's a movement to forbid it.

For example, it's illegal to photograph the Eiffel Tower at night when its
lights are lit:

[http://wiki.gettyimages.com/897/](http://wiki.gettyimages.com/897/)

~~~
Crespyl
I am boggled.

------
l33tbro
Yet again, The New Yorker hobbles closer to the realm of click-bait.

After the Malik trots us down the obligatory Sontag shortcut to establish
credibility on the subject of photography and authenticity, he goes into some
genuinely informative and interesting stuff about Google Photos. But this
appears to be a ruse, as Malik pulls back the curtain to reveal that it is yet
another article proselytizing about the death of authenticity and the
increasing shallowness of us digital heathens. The ensuing unqualified
speculation at times borders on the ridiculous:

"We are all taking too many photos and spending very little time looking at
them."

Maybe Sedaris and the New Yorker IT dept have developed a secret algo to
qualify factual statements like this one? Then there's this factually-stated
pearl:

"Photos are less markers of memories than they are Web-browser bookmarks for
our lives." How so? Certainly not for myself. Albeit anecdotal, but I spend
much more time these days joyfully poring over high-def Iphone photos snapped
on trips away or of portraits of loved ones.

Also, its always a bit of a tell with an article's quality when its title
commences with "In the future". We only have to look at the amazing HoloLens
video on Ars (1) the other day to see that photography may well fall by the
way-side once that kind of tech reduces to contact lens size, and virtual
imagery will become much more enabled to move at 24 frames per second.

(1) [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/hands-on-hololens-
on-...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/hands-on-hololens-on-the-cusp-
of-a-revolution/)

~~~
trelltron
Tangentially related, but Black Mirror has a great episode which covers a
similar premise to your 'contact lens size HoloLens' one.

Basically everything you see is recorded, and you can revisit any moment
you've experienced any time you want. Which has many negative effects in the
show, but which would actually avoid the author's problem altogether, as you
no longer have to 'spend time' to take pictures.

If recording of all of your experiences (good and bad) are implicit, then will
it improve our ability to live in the moment? Will it dilute the significance
of the moments we want to 'choose' to remember if everything else is bundled
in there too?

One of the suggestions of the episode seems to be that allowing ourselves to
return to the past to such a degree can make it hard to escape from it and
move on with out lives.

~~~
eterm
This episode was "The Entire History of You" if anyone is looking to check it
out. It is one of the strongest episodes of all the series.

------
JoeAltmaier
I don't take pictures. But I like them. I'm still waiting for the vacation-
album app - where I just photobomb other people on vacation, then on Facebook
it finds all those pictures from other people that I'm in (maybe using my
location-info history from my phone) and makes me an album!

------
ciroduran
In the Future, We Will Bookmark Everything and Read Nothing

~~~
voyou
Reminded me of this, from Douglas Adams's _Dirk Gentley 's Holistic Detective
Agency_:

"An Electric Monk is a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video
recorder. Dishwashers wash tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother
of washing them yourself, video recorders watch tedious television for you,
thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believe
things for you, thus saving you what is becoming an increasingly onerous task,
that of believing all the things the world expect you to believe."

------
jl6
I fit the description of the perp. I take a lot of photos and don't spend a
massive amount of time browsing through them. But I do this because I know
that one day I will be old and frail and won't have the physical capacity to
get out there photographing any more. At that point, I will be content with
task of organising and curating them all.

~~~
EliRivers
How do you know now what you will be content to do when you're old and frail?

~~~
monk_e_boy
Um, talking to old frail people who are like you. They are real people who
used to be programmers and photographers and surfers and skaters. Chat to them
and they often show you their old photos. I assume that because they were like
me at 30 then I will be like them at 70.

~~~
EliRivers
When you're typing, you don't have to write "um" at the start. That has a use
in verbal communication but it's superfluous in the written word, and forces
me to choose whether you're deliberately giving the impression of being a
teenager or you just type as if you were speaking.

That aside, I still disagree. I bet that if those 70 year old people had the
choice of looking at things they used to do, or being able to actually do them
again as if they were 30, they'd prefer to do them again. They're forced to
settle for the pictures because that's all that's on offer.

~~~
monk_e_boy
You say you disagree and then go on to agree with me. Huh?

~~~
EliRivers
When you're typing, you don't have to say "huh" at the end. That question mark
you've used can be used to indicate a question; the tonal grunt of "huh" isn't
needed.

~~~
monk_e_boy
Good lord you are the most boring person in the world, we all read technical
manuals all day and some of us enjoy playing with language.

I suppose you watch TV and moan that it's fucking entertaining with amusing
puns and clever use of language (fuck Bill Shakespeare eh?) No no NO NO! TV
should be a series of facts presented as white text on a black background. You
sir are an arse. Why are you even on the internet spewing your hate? EliRivers
is a boring bland person. No sense OF FUN and not at all interesting in any
way.

I bet a lot of people respond to you with tonal grunts. Is it that they all
just wished you'd go away and leave them alone? Huh? Yep. 'fink so.

------
51Cards
I have to add this as I just returned from vacation myself. I have caught
myself stuck in what I like to call "click and walk" syndrome when traveling
so on this trip I resolved to significantly reduce the number of photos I
took.

Being aware of it made me watch the people around me more. A large number of
people don't look at sights anymore. They see it through their phone because
they hold the device up constantly as an intermediary to the real world. They
walk towards something, raise the phone, look at it through the camera/screen,
click a photo, immediately turn away. My hobby on this trip was observing the
people who really weren't looking at anything at all and it surprised me how
many there are.

Made me think back to the trips I have taken where I returned with hundreds of
photos of things I had barely taken the time to actually look at. If you're
doing that, just travel via the web, it's cheaper.

------
duhast
This is how people watch fireworks these days: through small screen of their
phone while recording the scene.

------
talmand
But this is also a huge positive for future historians. Imagine the huge
amount of data they will have to study what today's society was like. Imagine
if we had such data for the last couple of thousand years.

~~~
joosters
Historians have had 'too much' data for many decades now. Your photo of the
Mona Lisa is probably not going to fill a significant gap in our future
understanding of the times.

~~~
ggreer
Often, this supposedly redundant data is useful in ways current society can't
fathom. Millions of photos of the Mona Lisa taken over decades won't tell you
much new about the Mona Lisa. But it will tell you a lot about changes in
camera technology over that time.

Also, the long tail is _long_. There are whole cultures and subcultures that
would be completely forgotten if not for archives.

At Defcon 19, Jason Scott gave a talk titled Archive Team: A Distributed
Presentation of Service Attack[1]. In it, he explains why this data is
important. As you rightly point out, the vast majority of it is boring and
useless. It matters to no one but the author and their friends. But some of it
is weird or funny, and a tiny bit of it is pure historical gold.

The early days of usenet, for example, contain tons of interesting
conversations involving people who are now prominent. Thanks to these
archives, we can get a better picture of these people's lives than in earlier
times.

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ZTmuX3cog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ZTmuX3cog)

------
galfarragem
That's one of the unanswered questions of our time: how to deal with
information overload?

Some hints (that I use for my personal answer):

[https://sivers.org/hellyeah](https://sivers.org/hellyeah)

[https://sivers.org/gifts](https://sivers.org/gifts)

[https://github.com/eniomauro/hamster-
gtd](https://github.com/eniomauro/hamster-gtd)

------
Sideloader
"In the future, he said, the “real value creation will come from stitching
together photos as a fabric, extracting information and then providing that
cumulative information as a totally different package.”

What? Obfuscating language that is supposed to sound "profound" or "smart"
just sounds like bullshit, which is exactly what it is.

The future of photography as predicted in this article sounds depressing as
hell. How much further can our society be dumbed down and turned into a
superficial shell of itself? That said, there is no guarantee that the future
of photography will unfold as predicted here.

But a society that values only money and denies ever growing numbers of people
a stable future and the fair chance to earn a decent livelihood is a society
that is on the road to revolution. The rise of a demagogue like Trump is a
warning shot across the bow. There is more at stake here than photography.
Laugh, roll your eyes or downvote but people who predict unpopular, fantastic
sounding societal change are often laughed at...until they are proven right.

------
SeanDav
A variation of this is being with people but not actually being present, i.e.
texting, updating Facebook status, email, etc. etc.

How often do I see a couple at a restaurant, or a group of friends at a social
gathering, who are barely interacting with each other but all have their noses
glued to their smart phones and frantically typing away.

------
zelos
_"...based on the ultra-conservative assumption that we each upload about two
photos a day to various Internet platforms, that means we take about four
billion photographs a day."_

2 per day? I guess I'm a massive luddite then. 2/month possibly.

~~~
lmm
Yeah. I find that the ease of taking photos has ironically made me do it less.
I used to think I had to take as many photos as I could. Now I only take them
when I think I'm going to want to look at them.

------
cammil
This is already as it is now.

~~~
developer2
This certainly doesn't apply to me. I'm one of those nuts who gets annoyed by
people taking out their shitty camera phones to record video during fireworks
displays. It's so irritating to have everyone with their bright screens
whiting out the night vision required to properly enjoy the show. Nobody even
watches the fireworks anymore, as they're too busy staring at tiny blobs of
color on their phone screen or preview window on the back of their camera.

I've stopped going to fireworks shows. I also no longer go to the cinema, lest
I murder a fellow moviegoer for using their fucking cell phone during the
movie. If the cinema wants my dollar, they're going to have to install Faraday
cages / jammers. Which will never happen, because "Think of the children -
what if the babysitter has an emergency!" and "What if I need to call 911!". I
can't imagine how people managed to watch a movie back before cell phones were
the norm. How in the world did people disconnect from the digital network for
90-120 minutes?! It's unfathomable!

~~~
burkaman
You do sound like a nut. Watching fireworks is not stargazing, it's never that
dark to begin with. And unless you're in NYC on the 4th of July, it's not that
hard to find a spot a few feet away from someone with a camera and ignore
them.

And yes, cell phones at the movies are annoying. Sometimes people are
annoying. If they didn't have cell phones, they would talk, or open loud
snacks, or something. It's not a sacred temple, it's a movie theater, get over
it.

------
grkvlt
I remember when camcorders with flip out screens started to appear, and
everyone commented the same thing - people only think something is real if
they are watching it on their camcorder screen. I guess the smart-phone has
replaced the camcorder now, but this is hardly a new phenomenon, and it didn't
end the world the first time...

EDIT - just realised this is a three-day old comments page, nm

------
bduerst
This article reminds me of this picture:

[http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2015/10...](http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2015/10/senior-woman-living-in-moment-no-smartphone-
celebrities-movie-premiere-black-mass-fb1.jpg)

~~~
jtolmar
For the people in the back, the phone is acting like a periscope. It's
probably improving their view.

~~~
bduerst
And everyone on their phones in the front? Is the digital zoom enhancing their
view?

------
j_s
I enjoy taking pictures of the people I know, not so much their surroundings.
Video is even better!

The future of recording is an interesting thought exercise... photographs will
become antiquated as video takes over, but what comes after that?

------
b0ner_t0ner
Headline reminds me of one of my favourite poems:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5IERp2OdJs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5IERp2OdJs)

------
dynofuz
Maybe in the future we will actually look at everything and have to photograph
nothing because it's being done automatically by our brain chip.

------
macspoofing
Computers will look at everything and organize, link, collate, combine,and
transform the mountains of data and metadata we generate.

~~~
thisislame
Pretty much this, but I'd take it a step further.

We are, collectively, only marginally more aware of our role in a larger
system of observation and cognition/emergent behavior than a rod or cone in
our retinas (or, more aptly, an extraocular muscle) is of its roles in our own
individual visual system.

We are, increasingly, sensor platforms for leviathan.

------
xlm1717
Soon you won't have memories, only pictures.

