Which brings me to my point. How should we, I, feel about post-treatment in photography? This has been on my mind for some time now. Cropping, adjusting the contrast, modifying the colors, the temperature… One can see it as an efficient way to compensate for technical or human limitations. I improve the contrast on my pictures because my objective is not the best I can get. I couldn’t get any closer to my subject, so I didn’t take the picture I had in mind: I can crop this picture to get the exact shot I wanted from the beginning. Sometimes, post-treatment is the continuity of the creative act of shooting something or someone.

The original version of the picture

In the same time, where is the limit? At which point do I switch from fighting against limitations and pursuing my idea – whether it is brilliant or déjà-vu – to cheating? If I modify my picture too much, don’t I empty it from all its humanity? From me, from my presence in the picture? And without my presence to make it live, what is the value of the picture?

Maybe a more radical approach is necessary. Maybe I need to force myself to never edit my pictures. This way, I would not fear to be a fraud anymore. The pictures would be the pure result of me, my camera and my subject. But I would be way more frustrated by my work. I have enough troubles already in my relationship to my pictures. I find what I do to be déjà-vu, without any quality or interest, for the vast majority of my shots. Do I really want to aggravate this? Plus, one can see digital post-treatment as an equivalent to the analog tricks that exist during the developing process. I’m not familiar enough with these tricks to be more accurate, but I do know they exist and can change in a significant way the final picture.

As of today I live with minor edits, and I’m proud of the edited picture that I ended up with. This is closer to what I had in mind than the original picture, and I’m ok with it. But I know this is unfinished business. This issue will keep bothering me until I can exempt myself from editing my pictures without being frustrated by the quality of my work. Which, honestly, is not going to happen.

The first important thing to note is that status updates have evolved out of instant messaging. This might be obvious to some, but for those who find it puzzling, please see Jennifer van Groven’s article about the history of the status message. The status evolved from being a simple signal of presence, like opening your eyes would be a signal of your being awake, to a more complex message like the kind you would put on your doorknob in a hotel room to notify room service of your wishes. What this fact can teach us is that originally, the status message was aimed at a defined group of recipients. So if for instance your AOL Messenger was set to „busy”, „away”, or adorned with a custom message like „cooking my mother-in-law’s socks”, this was insofar still a „message” as it was directed at those users who a) were listed as your contacts and b) were online to see the message.

Today, the status update is called so because it can no longer be seen as a „message”. Messages imply defined recipients. Although you may see your group of 500+ facebook friends as „defined recipients”, the truth is you are no longer taking into account every one of them as you are typing your status update. So, who are you thinking about? In all probability, you are sending this message to an undisclosed recipient, no longer thinking in terms of „for whom” but more „for what”. In other words, the impulse in composing your status is more content-driven than receiver-oriented. The function that your message will fill is not therefore so much informative nor conative as it is expressive.

In recent months, both twitter and facebook have changed their status questions – that is the phrase which prompts you to fill in the blank space which becomes your status message, visible to all (twitter) your friends (facebook). The traditional facebook question (in English) was „What are you doing right now?” and has become „What’s on your mind?” in March 2009, while the original twitter question was „What are you doing?” and changed to „What’s happening?” in November 2009. Let’s take a closer look at this double shift:

• What are you doing right now? → What’s on your mind?
• What are you doing? → What’s happening?

Here is what Facebook spokesperson Meredith Chin had to say about the new question:

“It’s going to be more about the message you want to send to others than what you’re doing at that very moment”.

The facebook trend is switching from lifecasting to mind-casting (those unfamiliar with these pretty self-evident terms are referred to Jay Rosen’s work), which is pretty self-explanatory. It is generally more interesting to learn what you are thinking than what you are doing, since thoughts are shareware, whereas that tuna sandwich you just had will be yours forever. Lifecasting would make sense if we were aware of all the recipients. Informing them of our context (referential function) or establishing communication lines with them by saying whether we are available or not (phatic function) become useless when faced with a myriad of nameless potential recipients, which is what your facebook friends become if you have more than 100 or so.

It is interesting to note that the prompts are not exactly prompting your mind to „cast” the same thing in the different language versions. For instance, the Canadian French Facebook will ask you „What are you thinking?” while the French French will encourage you to „Express yourself”.

The twitter trend has taken it even further.  The official Twitter blog states that the change is simply a response to user practice: the trend has been picked up from the bottom (see the RT function or # usage). A very revealing comment by Biz Stone shows the delicate intricacies of this bottom-up trend-setting story:

„it seemed like only a small part of the twitter updates were actually answering the “What are you doing?” question, which are of the more personal, less newsworthy variety: “(…) a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.”

Even if some users on twitter were in effect using it as a micro-news/alert system, it is quite possible that Biz Stone himself played a part in the trend-setting by putting a name on what he strived to encourage: a “newsworthy” variety of tweets, making Twitter your real-time Google. Stone adds that

„The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates.”

To sum up, twitter has gone beyond the idea of mindcasting, and into something more like awareness-casting. What this means is status updates are going to be less and less about what you think, believe, feel, at a given moment (emotive, expressive functions) and more and more about what your alert, perceptive reason has noticed, that is worth sharing with the world. Strangely enough, all updates are potentially of the same value since we are all liable to notice/discover/witness something equally noteworthy, wherever we may be. It could be argued that twitter willingly chose this kind of trend at its outset, by 1) limiting the length of updates to 140 characters and 2) making all your tweets visible by default to anyone.

To some, status updates have evolved from simple inward-based signals like “I’m here” or “I’m busy”, to informative statements with limited objective value like “I’m sick of being tired.”, to mindcasting and finally to outward-based signals like “Girl shot in Tehran”. They call this a new era of „citizen journalism”. It doesn’t take much to notice, however, that 1) mindcasting in itself is not worthless, and 2) journalism entails much more than can fit into 140 characters. At best, the new trend twitter’s masterminds are trying to „pick up” is transforming the status update into a dynamic, organic wire which will make us aware of more than we could possibly be if we were in touch with all noteworthy events happening NOW.

References:
1.     Jennifer van Groven (Mashable)
2.    Jay Rosen (NYU)
3.    For comic yet topical relief, see The Oatmeal.

Still, the effort was interesting. You don’t have the same Internet consumption on your regular laptop, with your tuned browser and the ease of well-known shortcuts, compared to the one you can have on an iPhone or the crappy old laptop that your grandfather uses (interestingly enough he has an up-to-date browser, IE 8, but still). It’s just not the same. It’s like using someone else’s slippers: as comfy as it gets, they’re just not your slippers.

So I found myself not checking my usual websites more than once a day. I even stopped checking the news sites (the ones I usually read are definitely too long to load on my iPhone, and without any Flash they lose some interest). Instead of being updated every minute with the whereabouts of a Nigerian-looking guy who could not stand to remain seated for a whole hour – which seems to be close enough to terrorism according to some flight attendants – I learnt about the incident a couple of days later, in the newspapers.

Guess what? It didn’t change my life. The pertinence of the fact was actually improved by the delay of the reporting. Allow me to explain. Instead of reading at least 5 different reports of this story on the web, I had a summarized, pertinent piece of information in 20 lines a day later, in a newspaper. Instead of giving more than 200 lines, often filled with incomplete or false facts (especially the first reports) to such a non-news, the newspaper editors took some time to figure out what was actually happening and if it was worth great coverage. Turns out the guy just wanted to take a piss – 20 lines, in memoriam.

I have many more examples, from the past few months, to offer you. I was actually considering writing about these issues for some weeks now. Remember Tiger Woods’ car accident/alleged wife cheating? How many tweets actually mentioned that? What is the percentage of pertinent information? I don’t have it, but we should ask Biz Stone and friends. I’m sure it’s quite low.

I think we are approaching one of the big challenges of the Internet: the negative consequences of real-time. In After Photography, Fred Ritchin sums it up when he talks of:

“[...] this Internet stew where speed is of the essence and subtleties are often obscured.”

Talk about “subtleties” when the new primary real-time information stream is Twitter… 140 characters is not what I would call “an accurate report”. So you have to cut in the details – come on, as important as they can get, they’re just details.

At the dawn of real-time, we should be considering the best way to handle these new streams of information. If you ask me, as good as information technology is, and as fast as the innovation happens, the fight against this major flaw of the real-time Internet won’t be won by better search engines, better algorithms or new Twitter features. It will have more to do with our behavior when confronted to these streams.

Separate the urgent from the unnecessary, filter the sources, cross-reference and double-check: we might have started to do that these last years. Now it needs to become systematic and more efficient. The theory has been expressed thousands of times, but it is valid more than ever today: in front of the real-time Internet, we can’t just stay consumers. We need to be active to not get overwhelmed.

Then again, it’s just a thought.

References
Ritchin, Fred, After Photography, W. W. Norton & Company, 2008 – see also his regularly updated blog.

Still…

At the dawn of a real-time-focused era, when reaching out to the world has never seemed easier, when innovation is the norm, when information flows to you in an endless stream… It’s easy to get overwhelmed. It’s quite common to react on the spot. It’s more of a challenge to actually take the time to step back and think. Let alone try to deal with trends and come up with analysis.

And that’s why we have decided to join the crowd! Here comes yet another blog. About culture, communication, new technologies in the digital age. Full disclosure: if you are allergic to words such as Twitter and Facebook, we’re sorry; these are words you might encounter over here.

You might be wondering why you should bother to read us. Fair enough. We will do our best to come up with something slightly different. Among other things:

• Two authors: that means two different views, two different styles, two different opinions… Twice as many reasons to be interested in this blog!
• A long-term focus: we have usually neither the time nor the particular desire to blog instantly about the latest trend or hype. It might happen though – nobody’s perfect.

If you’re still not convinced… Well, we did our best. Otherwise, see you around!