“It feels like the internet's impact on culture is just beginning. A world in which culture is based on the internet, which is what I think is happening, is just the very start. Right, 'cause it had to get universal before it could set the culture.”
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape in the Dot Com era of the 90s
The internet's impact on culture - Richard MacManus (ricmac.org)
As Marc Andreessen asserts, the impact of the internet on culture is in its infancy and we are just about seeing the impact now. Andreessen was huge during the .com bubble of the late 90s. He founded Netscape as a browser. If we consider music and later photography both as cultural entities, music was shared by peer to peer file sharing (P2P). This was eventually curtailed by a legal system and the music business found ways to sell music digitally-through iTunes, iPod etc. This meant the traditional ways of selling music was not as big-CDs and albums.
The music industry seemed to struggle to adapt at first to the internet due to P2P but eventually, it adapted to it.
2015. This was the year that everything changed.
According to The internet's impact on culture - Richard MacManus (ricmac.org)
"The advent of streaming, from Spotify and others, was the first sign that the internet might no longer be just a distribution channel for music. In fact, Spotify ended up fundamentally changing how we consume music.
With streaming and the online subscription model, by 2015 the internet had begun to shape and re-make the music business. Or as Marc Andreessen might say, set the culture"
Although like any new technological paradigm, music streaming didn't happen suddenly in a single year. There was a build-up - and build out - of several years.
Spotify was initially launched only in Europe, starting October 2008, but it didn’t really take off as a cultural phenomenon until its US launch in July 2011. By September 2011, Spotify had doubled its paying subscribers to 2 million. By the end of 2012, it was 20 million total active users, including 5 million paying customers globally. Fast forward another couple of years and it was 60 million users, including 15 million paying, by December 2014"
By 2020, Spotify has 248 subscribers. This is one example of how the internet has shaped and changed on business model that was once considered sacred-the music business. The internet changed how we consume and listen to music. Apple had witnessed the success of Spotify and in 2015 created iTunes Radio-similar to Spotify. Users had partial control over content and could stream music.
Further advances such as YouTube and Facebook would emerge and become platforms of how we view music. The internet has created a lot of change in one sector of the creative arts. Now, CDs are almost obsolete. instead of our music consisting of hardware such as records (such as when I was a lad) now it is software which is on a storage device. There are many examples of how the internet has impacted on society, this is just one example.
A term now exists called "The Standardization of Culture" this means that though forces such as globalization and the homogony of states, information has been standardized. According to Essay on the Effects of Internet on our Culture! (yourarticlelibrary.com) "With the newfound exploration of cultures, cultural uniqueness has decreased because people see there are other possible ways of living life. Persons of one culture may like the way another culture does something and then start to do that something themselves.
This can spread throughout the culture and soon the two cultures will contain fewer differences. Cultural homogenization will continue to occur as the number of cultures about which information is available on the Internet increases and the ‘diversity of the Internet’s content grows’.
In conclusion, the internet has affected every aspect of society. From information, education, economics to politics. Everything is affected by the internet.
Source
The internet's impact on culture - Richard MacManus (ricmac.org)
Essay on the Effects of Internet on our Culture! (yourarticlelibrary.com)
culture and the internet - Bing images
How has the internet affected photography.
The camera and its evolution.
The camera has come a long way since it was conceived 197 years ago. This change is evident not only in the type of cameras on the market-but also the way photographs are disseminated to the viewer. The first cameras for mass consumption were created by George Eastman (Kodak) who created "the box brownie" in 1900 that used a paper based film and was less expensive then the metal based film used by previous camera film. By 1913, Oskar Barnack created a 35mm camera which would become very popular and make photography extremally accessible. By 1948, the only barrier that was not popular was the waiting times that customers had to wait for film to be developed. This was addressed when Kodak created a polaroid camera. The developing of an image was almost instantaneous. In 1986, photography was made more accessible to consumers when disposable cameras were created. Finally, photography moved away from film completely and moved towards digitally based creation and consumption in 1991. However, it took another decade for digital cameras to dominate the market. Camera makers such as Canon and Nikon recognized this earlier then dominant analogue film market leaders Kodak and would see both companies overtake Kodak as makers of cameras.
The new millennium saw further changes to photography hardware such as cellphone cameras. The first models were primitive. Todays mobile phone cameras have different modes such as portrait and landscape as well as astounding megapixels which denote the quality of the images. Finally, in 2005, the first DSLR. According to The History behind Cameras – Kodak Digitizing "Shooting like a pro wasn’t just for the professionals anymore. With the release of the Canon EOS 5D, it became the first consumer-priced full-frame digital SLR"
This digitalization of images and photography would be perfect timing as the internet was created in the mid 1990s. Out of this, social media platforms were soon created. Modest at first such as Myspace and later Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We take 60 million images a year and share them on social media platforms. According to How the internet has changed photography (telegraph.co.uk) "
Facebook, for instance, is one of the largest photo repositories in the world; users have uploaded more than 20 billion pictures to the social-networking site. Likewise Twitter is emerging as a key way of sharing pictures; users are taking pictures on their phones and posting them instantly to the web, resulting in some memorable images, including the first photos of the plane that crashed in the Hudson river"
This demonstrates a change in how images are disseminated to wider audiences. Before the internet, images were in a family album or a tin contained negatives in the attic. Now, images on social media are accessible to anybody (including the government or prospective employers doing searches). This way of showing images has "democratized" photography and made the way it is disseminated accessible.
The way we store our images has changed too. Instead of keeping photos in an album, peoples memories are on a computer, memory stick, hard drive or on the cloud. Meaning people no longer have an that intrinsic relationship with an actual photograph anymore. All images are seen through a screen and housed on a hard drive. Using some storage and sharing platforms such as Instagram allows users to use editing tools. This is amazing when you consider the advances in the last 50 years of analogue photography and the wait the customer had to endure before getting the images back.
But, is all of this democratization a good or bad thing? Some argue that the internets relationship with photography is damaging photography. According to How Social Media is changing Photography, and Why that is a Good Thing | by Ryan Waneka | Lab Work | Medium "social media is helping more than it is hurting us photographers. Take, for example, the fact that large interconnected platforms have created the best potential for photographers to display their work to the world. “In professional photography, Instagram has also had a strong impact with an increasing number of photojournalists using the image-sharing mobile platform to build large groups of followers,” said Olivier Laurent of the British Journal of Photography. If you are looking to make a profession out of your photography, take advantage of the virtually free photography exhibit that is the internet"
The other point of view suggests that "The opposition argues that photography used to be an art form, and the few photos people had were more significant because of their scarcity. “Photographs used to be something to cherish. A good piece of photography even more so. It seems people are no longer buying photo albums to house pictures of their children cross dressing because they want to ‘be a girl when they grow up,” said Elise Levee of Social Media Today. I get it, the more we have of something, the less we appreciate it. But just like everything else in the world, photography is changing with the times. Media has changed over time from the newspaper, to radio, to TV and so on until we got to where we are now with the Internet. Music has evolved over time, storytelling has changed with time. The culture we live in is an ever-changing one, and I think we need to accept and work with it instead of stubbornly fighting the flow"
This accessibility of photography does not mean that all genres of photography have improved. To understand photography, you need to understand "the rule of thirds" light, mechanics of the camera, composition and shutter speed. A lot of people put armature images online, as well as professionals putting their images online. According to https://medium.com/lab-work/how-social-media-is-changing-photography-and-why-that-is-a-good-thing-91d356adf77c
“We’re losing our appreciation of photographers in favor of a love of people who snap a photo with their iPhone.” I disagree. We know the difference. There is something in the human brain that can tell the difference between a beautiful, well-composed photograph and a pixelated image of a Starbucks coffee cup with an Instagram filter on it. We know what is aesthetically appealing, because certain visual stimuli pleases us"
Therefore, if a photographer is good enough and their image stimulates a response from us, that photographers work will get noticed. This saturation of imagery has created more photographs but the public still have the ability intrinsically built in to tell a bad or mediocre photograph from a professionally mastered image. As well as a saturation of imagery, social media has created content that is not only inspirational but inspirational also. A look on social media can inspire the viewer to improve their work. During the Covid lockdowns of 2020, the world got creative in part due to social media. This is a good thing surely. As mentioned above about the music business and how the internet has made music assessable and open to all, this is evident in photography and it is unavoidable. The internet is changing every aspect of culture in our world and there is no escaping it.
No comments:
Post a Comment