SUPER-SANITY--! #1

Do you think there any Aboriginal MySpacers? Follow me on a hypothetical tangent for a moment. I mean, we're all aware of the Aborigine idea of "a photo steals your soul", so do these hypothetical Aboriginal MySpacers get tutted at by their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents? I'm always fascinated by the way culture and society change over time, and rightly so, too--! If we aren't aware of what came before, then how can we move forward with any real clarity? Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not talking about personal clarity-- that can only be discovered by looking at yourself and coming to your own conclusions-- no, I'm talking about societal clarity, the kind of thinking that takes entire countries forwards and backwards due to how we feel at one point in time.

I have a point to make.

I believe that we, as a generation-- the children of the dying 20th Century-- can be defined by photos. I don't believe that any group of under 20s before this generation can be defined as such. We record everything, we immortalise a moment and then reminisce about it nearly immediately. Every person I know has a camera, and those people don't leave the house without them. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, quite the contrary, I think this is wonderful. This is solid proof of our existence, of our personal connections.

Photos say that "We were here", and i don't think we can be forgotten. Photos, of course immortalise moments of defiance, of hope, of defying what we believe to be completely and utterly wrong. Circulation of photos has increased from simply newspapers to the world wide web-- sites like flckr, photobucket, and deviantart ensure that your work is circulated throughout the world within moments of being uploaded. But then again, does that dilute photos like this...

...When all we see when we log onto websites is stuff like this?


Our antics are recorded and uploaded within hours of them occurring. We become nostalgic, quite literally, for yesterday, and I don't think this makes us bad people. Do we dilute the industry of photojournalism when we get drunk and take photos every twelve seconds? Who cares. Again, I believe we are defined by cameras, for technology that allows us to be immortalised acting like complete fools from that point in.

Not too terrible, I think.