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The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence
Summary
This article explores how the digital image evolved from film photography, and how the power to influence with imagery has shifted from being held by a select few to being held by nearly everyone. In the mid 1990’s to the early 2000’s, there was an upheaval in the world of image-making as film photography was turned upside-down by the 35mm quality digital image. With 4 billion new digital images published each day, the sheer volume of images exceeds our current technological ability to analyze digital images in a meaningful way. Before social media, images distributed by media outlets that are charged with emotion became the most iconic images of our time. Now, the digital image is a tool for good and evil and the power to wield it is in the hands of everyone. On the positive side, this article introduces the concept of a ‘contextual timestamp’ forming massive archives of our collective memory. And on the dark side, the ‘digital meme,’ that can represent pockets of hate that threaten our society in fringe web communities. How might we use the digital image as a tool for good?
If we lost Facebook, would we lose ourselves?
On July 25, 2018, The New York Times reported that Facebook shares fell 19%, wiping out $120B of shareholder wealth as investors learned the profits of the company would be going down due to necessary spending on security enhancements following months of scrutiny over Russian misuse of the platform in the 2016 American presidential campaign. The very nature of the technology that Facebook has created also ensures that it may be only one scandal away from its own demise. If Facebook were to fall, would we really lose ourselves? Not in the physical sense, but we would lose something that couldn’t be replaced with memory alone. We would lose a documentation of our ‘collective memory’ — groups of people that form shared memories; and memories that belong to a society as a whole.
