Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [30]
Anyone born before 1990 will remember how people treated photographs before the age of bits. Every stage of a photo’s life cycle was defined by one thing: cost. Film was expensive to buy and even more expensive to develop. Mistakes were costly, so chance was the enemy; everyone involved in the taking of a photograph acted accordingly. Taking a photo required posing everyone carefully, counting to three, and hoping that the shot came out. Only in extraordinary circumstances, like a wedding or family portrait, would more than one photo of the same subject be taken.
Once developed, almost all photos were kept—forever. Even mediocre photos were worth saving. Photos were expensive, after all, and the idea of throwing away any but the worst was nearly unthinkable. Most or all photos in a roll would find their way into a photo album, a proper showpiece for such precious items. The negatives had to be handled separately—held by the edges only!—and stored away in a cool, dark place, in case one of the photos was ever to be generated a second time.17
Film-based photographs were also costly in time: it took several days for a photo lab to develop the photos and deliver them back to the store for pickup. Admittedly, it was sort of fun to open up newly developed photos after waiting for several days—or longer, if the photographer was slow in sending the film to the lab. Polaroid made a huge advance with “instant cameras” whose photos developed within a couple of minutes when exposed to air. But the photo quality wasn’t as good as regular film-based cameras, and there were no negatives with which to make copies. Polaroid solved the problem of time at the cost of quality, and the film was still expensive.
Bits have changed the equation in every way. Now in the twenty-first century, digital cameras offer immediacy and quality and low cost. The “film” is just bits—free, immediate, in infinite quantities—and scarcity is a thing of the past. Abundance is now the rule in photography, and bit literacy shows how to work accordingly.
Ironically, the abundance of bits brings with it a new challenge of scarcity. We covered it earlier with text bits, and it is just as relevant with photos: in an age of infinite bits, time and attention are the scarce resources. Time management is essential for working successfully with e-mail and todos. Similarly, managing photos requires being aware and intentional about how we spend our time and attention. For users who grew up with film-based cameras, the challenge of bit literacy is to change one’s behavior.
Most people still do what they learned in the atomic era: taking one shot per subject, and never throwing away photos even if they’re mediocre or bad. These practices made sense when film was expensive, but in the digital era they miss out on the advantages of bits—the ability to take many photos, and filter out bad ones, for no extra cost. Most users haven’t learned bit-literate practices and are left with lower quality photos, since they rely on a single photo to capture a moment.
Other users take lots of photos, but they don’t know where to put them. Photos spanning several months or years may lie in random locations on the computer in varying states of organization. For these users, a digital camera is just one more source of overload.
Photos and tags
The technology industry promises an easy fix to the organization problem by allowing users to enter “metadata” (literally, “data about data”) about their photos. Some photo-organizing software, for example, allows users to rate each of their photos from zero to five stars. Users can thus save all their photos, duplicates and mediocre shots included, and presumably cut through the overload by simply sorting by rating. Other tools allow users to assign “tags,