I was just watching a random slide show on my Mac from my iPhotos library. I have pictures from a digital camera from 2001 to present. I also have some older pictures that I have scanned in, that date back as late as 1993, I still have not scanned them all in. All in all I have over 5000 pictures on my Mac. One of the great things about the digital age is that we can share our photos easily, look at http://photos.mikeoconnor.net to see some of the photos I have chosen to share with the world.
But there are 2 problems I see with digitalizing all photos. First, I am guilty of this, since the cost of development is 0, or you don’t see the cost since it is aggregated into the cost of your electricity, people are bound to take a lot more pictures, yes that will result in some great pictures but at the same time it will result in a lot of bad pictures. Next what happens in the next 50 to 70 years, when the digital generation starts to die? With all of our pictures on a computer, assuming they are not lost to some catastrophe, our next of kin will have to hack into our computers, I will admit I have solved this a bit by giving to my pastor the passwords to my computers. Yes once the computer is hacked into it will be easier to allow every one that wants a copy of a picture to have a copy of it.
With digital photos, I think we should look at change how we think of pictures, it has become very easy to generate a high number of pictures in a short period of time. Keeping track of the photos will become harder and harder as time goes on, and I don’t think current software is up to it. I am already feeling the limitations of iPhoto right now, I will also admit I only have iPhotos ’04
Photo’s are nothing, a new photo/text content will be created so you can easily search photos by using metadata. I think a more important question is what will happen to anything in print, particularly newspapers and books. I’m sure you heard that newspaper readership is way down. It’s happening because people can just go online and get the same content for free, some sites don’t even have advertisements. My problem with this is George Orwell and 1984. In that story, Winston Smith goes back and changes newspaper articles so that the current government news is much better than expected. We’re sort of doing that now with corporate profits, economy, and job rate (I love how they don’t consider people that lost unemployment benefits “unemployed” – they consider them as ones that gave up, but officially taken off the unemployment numbers). The point is, assuming we only have digital media from now on, how easy would it be to rewrite history, articles, news, projections, anything. History has always been written by the winners and revised by the ones in power. A great saying goes by “Whoever controls the past, controls the future. Whoever controls the present, controls the past.” It’s truly a scary thought, especially in the current infinite war we’re fighting.