A photo-filled future

By Matthew Gillis

Predicting the future of technology is like asking someone to fly to the moon; it’s nearly impossible, unless, of course, you’ve got genius connections. How can one predict something that literally changes from day-to-day?

If you’ve been keeping up with this blog, I think you understand that much of our daily lives depend upon technology. But more specifically, much of that technology involves the Internet, and I believe that future technology will too. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. That’s not a very groundbreaking prediction. However, I believe that even more aspects of our lives will be experienced online, from high school education to religious ceremonies.

But, surprisingly, it isn’t the idea of spending our lives on the virtual reality of the Web that scares me. It’s the continual reduction of information used to communicate online that does. In my lifetime, I’ve seen the way that the Internet and the tools we use from it shape how we maintain relationships through communicating. Like many of my peers, I was introduced to social networking with the ever-popular MySpace, where I was able to have complete control over my profile design, bio, interests, music, and heroes, among other categories. Once MySpace wasn’t “cool” anymore, I migrated to Facebook, where control over my profile’s design was lost. Similarly, expressing interests and music on Facebook is limited to a single picture of the activity or musician, for example, of which you have no control over. Even between these two social networks, I’ve seen how communicating your public image online is depending on less and less information, from the use of lengthy bios to now displaying a row of “interest” picture icons.

It seems that visuals, such as Facebook’s icons, are replacing the extensive forms of communication. Just look at an iPhone. The rows of app icons replace text-based descriptions.

I predict that the future of technology will be dependent on visuals rather than text. We may even be in the midst of this visual-focused future right now. Just look at the popularity of photo-sharing technologies such as Pinterest and Instagram. While I enjoy photography as a form of expression, I don’t think that pictures can replace text-based communication. Just as movies haven’t replaced books, I don’t think that photos can replace text. (I mean, who actually enjoys the movie version of a book over the book itself?)

Photo By Matthew T. Gillis/Instagram.

But it’s more than just my personal opinion that leads me to this concern. Our current educational system is still based on the use of text as the primary form of communication. Until schools begin giving courses on how to interpret imagery as a form of communication and how to produce such images appropriately, the future of image-based technology is quite frightening.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Just because you can take pictures, doesn’t mean you should.

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Find me on Instagram: mattgillis

Question what you read

Photo By Matthew Gillis/Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Original.

Photo By Matthew Gillis/Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Edited.

By Matthew Gillis

Wikipedia has capitalized on today’s societal idea of shared thinking. What could be more valuable than an encyclopedia that is created and maintained by the one’s experiencing and learning the things they’re writing about?

After signing up for a Wikipedia account, I began looking for photography-related articles that I could knowledgeably contribute to. However, the surprising part of the Wikipedia experience is that you don’t have to know about the articles you want to edit. As Stacy Schiff explains in her article “Know It All,” Wikipedia doesn’t favor the university professor over the high school cheerleader. Like many aspects of the web, anyone can contribute.

However, I found many drawbacks to this collective contribution. As I was reading the photography page, I discovered countless grammatical errors, several biased entries, and numerous inaccuracies. Desiring to contribute to Wikipedia as a member of our shared-thinking culture, I corrected several of the grammatical errors, added information about amateur photography, and removed biased facts about commercial photography.

Before learning more about the process of a wiki site like Wikipedia, I had taken what I read on the site as truthful information, despite many of my teachers’ warnings. I find that to be true with many written and published information. You take what you see at face value, and you believe what you read. I mean, honestly, how many of you have ever questioned the veracity of a newspaper article? But what makes something in writing, whether online or in print, seem worthy of our trust?

Photo By Matthew Gillis/Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Original.

Photo By Matthew Gillis/Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Edited.

I never believed that the edited information I provided was false, which made me surprised to find several of my contributions removed just hours later. While I see the practicality of having an “oversight” function, as Schiff describes, to eliminate vandals and inaccurate information, I was offended to see my work dismissed. Similarly, I am insulted when others edit my photographs to their liking. We gain a certain attachment to the works we create, whether in writing or through photography, and we tend to defend them as if they are the best, most truthful development.

I believe this is why we trust what we read. Once an idea is put into writing or captured on camera, we become attached to the validity of it, because we place high value on the time we took to create it. I think we overextend the idea of valuing effort to other people’s work as well.

Schiff suggests Wikipedia’s “breadth, efficiency, and accessibility” to be the site’s defining features over traditional encyclopedias. However, the reader’s false sense of trust with Wikipedia’s content (created by anyone, including Joe Shmoe) may be creating a culture of misinformed people.

Facebook, please be perfect

By Matthew Gillis

A perfect Facebook would be one that would not have let me post those angry “I-hate-the-world” statutes when I was 16. It would be a site that would have automatically deleted those God-awful pictures of me sleeping in public (with my mouth wide open, of course) the minute they were uploaded.

But I think a utopian Facebook would also include unlimited privacy settings, unflawed access to communication, and, of course, Words With Friends without advertisements.

After reading Fred Turner’s “How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology,” I found myself agreeing to his idea that new technologies always generate utopian hopes for its users. The reason I stopped using MySpace (with much reluctance) and started using Facebook was built on the belief that Facebook could solve the problems Myspace had, giving me, and every other pubescent eighth grader, hope for a utopian social network.

Merriam-Webster’s first definition of utopia reads, an imaginary and indefinitely remote place.

Imaginary. As I now know, a perfect Facebook is imaginary.

With the availability of digital cameras, being able to click a button has given everyone and his or her grandmother the ability to be a “photographer,” and now Facebook has given everyone the opportunity to be a publisher. But just because we can take pictures and we can publish them on this dystopian site doesn’t mean we should. I mean, we all have that Facebook friend we choose to keep “friended” due to his or her drunken Friday night pictures that we love to stalk.

I know that a Facebook free of flaws has the potential to connect people all over the world without negative consequence. But I also know that the dystopian Facebook we have today has the potential to create another technopanic, explained by Alice E. Marwick in “To Catch a Predator? The MySpace Moral Panic,” due to it’s ability to ruin relationships, careers, and our chances of ever having a clear slate for the future with just one click of a camera.

Just remember that until Facebook becomes a perfect place where the pictures of you sleeping with your mouth open or the ones of you passed out with “stupid” Sharpie-d across your forehead automatically delete, your utopian hopes are far from reality.

Technology: an uncontrollable monster?

By Matthew Gillis

Overwhelmed. This is the only emotion I can distinguish after reading the introduction to Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or be programmed: Ten commands for a digital age.  I keep coming back to the same question: do the digital technologies we willingly choose to be a part of actually have control over our individual realities?

To put this uncontrollable digital monster into a more manageable context, I’ll use photography. When I take a picture, the lens in which I’m looking through presents a portion of the world. I, being the photographer, am able to choose what aspects of the scene I want shown in the frame of the image. These deliberate decisions reflect my position as the producer of each image and show my role in constructing a new or altered reality for the viewer of these photographs. I have the ability to omit or highlight aspects of the scene.

As a photographer, I am responsible for both understanding how to use the camera and also how to produce my desired image, because I am shaping a potential viewer’s idea of reality. I am in agreement with Rushkoff, who similarly believes we are responsible for knowing how to use technology and being able to program, or create, it. Photographers are creating “reality” through images, while programmers are creating technology that is able to think and operate, controlling our realities and, ultimately, us (Rushkoff 21).

If we choose to ignore that photos aren’t necessarily reflections of true reality, we choose to be falsely influenced. Doesn’t this seem similar to Rushkoff’s idea that failing to understand programming of technologies, which control our realities, is choosing to be programmed?

Going back to my original question, I have come to an answer: yes.

I think it’s our duty as consumers of technology to be able to discuss the function of technology. If it’s our job as a society to shape each technology’s use and meaning, according to “What’s New About New Media?,” then isn’t it equally our responsibility to be able to understand how to use it and how to create it?