culture vulture

As digitalization expounds itself with such terminal velocity into history it causes ripples in humanity's psycho-social space time continuum. Before long these ripples become waves - waves that are undoubtedly rocking the proverbial boat. Now the ocean can be called progress, the boat can be named culture and the only thing that is for certain in this new media whirlpool is that it is a long way away from the quiet coasts of tradition and conservatism. Digitalization is a radical force. To illustrate just how radical it is take the process of image capturing. Compare the early photographic techniques to the new. Once upon a time it took an eighteen wheel truck to carry a camera on an expedition to snap a few happy scenes of the local countryside. Today an entire fully edited feature length movie can be captured on a device no bigger than a matchbox. I hope the contrast in this image gives a clear enough indication of how radical the transformative power of the digital machine really is. Albeit that the two examples are situated more than a century apart they are nonetheless situated in a category of the new. Much like driving, flying and antiseptics photography is a modern phenomenon. Progress it seems waits for nothing as even the term modern is relegated to file named traditional relics as we move rapidly into the world of the post-post. Like the camera's ability to compress time and space into a single frame so too is digitalization shrinking context. In viewing photography as a cultural product from a new media perspective the implications are varied and the values ambiguous. Singularity can not hold fast its each man for himself.