Tag Archives: photos

iPhone combat: Bloggers: 1, Jean-Louis Gassee: 0

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I’m a big fan of Jean-Louis Gassée. So I was pleased to see a new post from him today

It’s called iPhone Nonsensus: Apple’s Debt To Bloggers.

Gassee goes after bloggers, specifically Steve Kovach of Tech Insider, for their criticism of the iPhone 7. He believes the bloggers failed to see that the 7 has an market shifting advantage after all, the new dual camera.

How did the pundits miss the obvious advantages of a dual camera? The improvement is indisputable and easy to demonstrate: The second “telephoto” lens is more appropriate for many pictures; faces, for instance, aren’t seen at their best advantage by the usual wide-angle lens.

Gassee contends that bloggers have failed to see that picture-taking is where the iPhone creates extraordinary value.

We now reach the absurdity: One of the most popular picture-taking devices on earth (the iPhone is either the world’s number one digital camera, or very close) is heavily rumored to be gaining a significant improvement — a second camera — but no, the blogosphere reached a “nonsensus” and steadfastly stuck to it. Nothing to see here…move on to the sure-to-be-groundbreaking 2017 iPhone 8…

Gassee is right to say that cameras matter. A couple of years ago I wrote a post called ARE PHOTOS A SECRET INGREDIENT OF THE INTERNET ECONOMY?

Here’s my argument:

We tend to think that photos matter because they are a record of the world. But this is only the necessary condition of their significance. The reason they really matter is that they are the single, smallest, richest, cheapest, easiest token of value and meaning online. We mint them. We trade them. We accumulate them. We treasure them.

So I agree with Gassee in general terms. But I think he is wrong in the particular.

Yes, photos matter. But the real question here is: do telephoto photos matter?  And the answer is, probably, not really.

The reason photos matter is that they have social significance.

Individually, photos are content coursing through our personal “economies.” They are the single most efficient way to build and sustain our social networks. We gift people with photos. They reciprocate. Hey, presto, a social world emerges.

Collectively, photos create a currency exchange. They are a secret machine for seeing, sharing, stapling, opening, sustaining and making relationships. Want to know where networks are going? See who is giving what to whom, in the photo department. Photos are in constant flight. They are a kind of complex adaptive system out of which some of our social order comes.

The iPhone camera got better. But consumers won’t care about this particular improvement because the existing camera is already doing the social job that needs to be done. A telephoto photo will not improve the iPhone as a social instrument, as a means by which we see, share, staple, open, sustain and make our social relationships.

In sum, the iPhone 7 does not have a realistic hope of an extraordinary consumer response…at least not because it has an improved camera. From the essential social point of view, there is no improvement.

Bloggers 1, Gassee 0

Are photos a secret ingredient of the internet economy?

KodakBuildingI’ve been asking myself the big question: “Why did FB buy What’sApp for $19 billion?”

I know I am late to the party.  But surely this puzzle is still a puzzle even if the buzz(le) has moved on.

For me, there are four answers.

1) Facebook was trying to stay in touch with its early adopters, specifically young people who are now migrating away from Facebook at speed.  Early adopters are early warning.  Where they go, the world will follow.

2) Facebook was attempting to disrupt a disrupter.  Mark Zuckerberg has read his Clay Christensen.  He doesn’t want to suffer the fate of Friendster.  WhatsApp looked like the future.  So he bought it.

3)  The third answer has to do with the power of photos. Whatsapp users send 600 million photos every day.  (http://news.yahoo.com/whatsapp-19-billion-bet-facebook-053029423–finance.html)  And Facebook knows what this means. Chris Hughes, a FB founder, thought that photos could make FB “sticky” and discovered that they made it positively magnetic.  (Photos may be the biggest reason Facebook didn’t drop from view like Friendster.)

4)  The fourth answer turns on the mysterious properties of the photograph.  (This is a topic dear to my heart.  I did research for Kodak in the US, Europe and Asia.)

We tend to think that photos matter because they are a record of the world.  But this is only the necessary condition of their significance.  The reason they really matter is that they are the single, smallest, richest, cheapest, easiest token of value and meaning online.  We mint them.  We trade them.  We accumulate them.  We treasure them.

Individually, photos are content coursing through our personal “economies.”  They are the single most efficient way to build and sustain our social networks.  We gift people with photos.  They reciprocate.  Hey, presto, a social world emerges.

Collectively, photos create a currency exchange.  They are a secret machine for seeing, sharing, stapling, opening, sustaining and making relationships.  Want to know where networks are going?  See who is giving what to whom, in the photo department.  Photos are in constant flight.  They are a kind of complex adaptive system out of which some of our social order comes.

Why did Zuckerberg pay $19 billion for Whatsapp?  He was following the photos, that secret ingredient of the internet economy.

What are we looking for in those FB photos?

In an article called The Machine Zone in The Atlantic, these breathtaking stats about on-line photos are revealed:

“Facebook is the single largest photo sharing service in the world. In 2008, when the site had 10 billion photographs archived, users pulled up 15 billion images per day. The process was occurring 300,000 per second. Click. Photo. Click.

In 2010, Facebook had uploaded 65 billion images, and they were served up at a peak rate of 1 million per second. By 2012, Facebook users were uploading 300 million photos per day. And early this year, Facebook announced users had entrusted them with 240 billion photos.

If we assume the ratio of photos uploaded to photos viewed has not declined precipitously, users are probably pulling up billions of Facebook photos per day at a rate of millions per second. Click. Photo. Click.Facebook is the single largest photo sharing service in the world. In 2008, when the site had 10 billion photographs archived, users pulled up 15 billion images per day. The process was occurring 300,000 per second. Click. Photo. Click.

In 2010, Facebook had uploaded 65 billion images, and they were served up at a peak rate of 1 million per second. By 2012, Facebook users were uploading 300 million photos per day. And early this year, Facebook announced users had entrusted them with 240 billion photos.

If we assume the ratio of photos uploaded to photos viewed has not declined precipitously, users are probably pulling up billions of Facebook photos per day at a rate of millions per second. Click. Photo. Click.”

Predictably, The Atlantic and author Alexis Madrigal harbor dark suspicions about what drives our interest in these photos.  

What if the 400 minutes a month people spend on Facebook is mostly (or even partly) spent in the machine zone, hypnotized, accumulating ad impressions for the company?

Here’s my contention: Thinking about the machine zone and the coercive loops that initiate it has great explanatory power. It explains the “lost time” feeling I’ve had on various social networks, and that I’ve heard other people talk about. It explains how the more Facebook has tuned its services, the more people seem to dislike the experiences they have, even as they don’t abandon them. It helps explain why people keep going back to services that suck them in, even when they say they don’t want to.

This seems to me, as a piece of criticism, almost entirely habitual.  The only thing more certain than each new wave of technology is the generation of intellectuals who exert themselves to show how this technology puts our agency, autonomy and liberty at risk. Note especially the term “hypnotized.”  Any time a deep thinker can find evidence that we are hypnotized, well, mission accomplished.  Put down your pen and walk away from the table!  

I don’t doubt that there is a darker side to our consumption of all these photos, but let us cast the net a little wider.  I think we are looking at all those photos in search of something. Actually, in search of many things.  Let’s have a wonder what.  

Reference

“The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can’t Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook.” 2013. The Atlantic.  (August 4, 2013).  For the full article, click here.  

Acknowledgments

To Steve Crandall for pointing out the article.  To Martin Silverman and his book Disconcerting Issue which opens with his respondents reading the newspaper looking for stories that make their lives make sense.  

Silverman, Martin G. 1971. Disconcerting Issue; Meaning and Struggle in a Resettled Pacific Community. University of Chicago Press.