After spending months straight in Waterloo, I went back home last week to Toronto to spend time with family. My father and I spend a a whole day cleaning out our basement and we came across a bunch of old film camera that belonged to my grandfather. According to my dad, photography was a hobby. But I couldn’t help but think, my generation and those around me are so attached to our tech. Our smartphones are out alarm clocks. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do (after hitting snooze on my alarms 5+ times), is that I check social media - Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Snapchat. When I got to a new restaurant or go to a concert, I feel the need to document it and share my experiences on social media. Many are guilty of doing may of these thing. At a concert for instance, I try and keep my phone use to a minimum, but I notice that many have their phones up the entire show filming the performances. They are watching the concert from their handheld device rather than enjoying the moment.
How does this have to do with this course/Communication Studies, you may be asking. Well, after finding those old film camera, which my dad even used 4 years ago at my high school prom to take photos, I realized that with these new technologies like digital camera and smartphone, we can take hundreds of photos, documenting every second and then choosing which ones we like/don’t like. We have the choice to make edits, add filters, not post the ones we don’t want to post. With film cameras, there’s something special about it. You get one shot to get the photo and you cannot look at your digital screen after it’s taken to see what it looks like. To see the final product, you have to get the film developed at a store to see the physical prints.
In our family basement, I also came across an old View-Master with reels of Canadian National Parks, beaches, and wonders of the world. It was so neat to see something so “old school” when now, I can easily see images like those through a quick Google search.
AR postcards
Nowadays, I discovered that View-Master now sells a virtuality reality starter pack that comes with “destinations app to create an immersive 360-degree view that changes as you move your head.” I saw on Product Hunt today that augmented reality postcards are a now thing.
To get a little theoretical, Marshall McLuhan’s transformation theory is relevant to this blog post. Each new technological mode of communication brings a transformation into society and each new piece of tech contains the previous tech in some sense of containment. Some of these technologies nowadays are disrupting industries and processes that many didn’t think was possible. In the late 90s, we were told not to get in strangers' cars and don't people from the Internet. Today, people are literally summoning strangers from the Internet to get into their car through services like Uber, Lyft, and RideCo. As much as I love technology and learning about innovative new products and disruption, I have this fascination and admiration for old technologies (film cameras, Polaroid photos, record players, typewriters), which may not be the best in tech or the most efficient in use, but we cannot forget these old ones that help shaped what we have and what we use today.
Archambault, Michael. "Film vs. Digital: A Comparison of the Advantages and Disadvantages." PetaPixel. N.p., 26 May 2015. Web. 22 Apr. 2017. <https://petapixel.com/2015/05/26/film-vs-digital-a-comparison-of-the-advantages-and-disadvantages/>.
Christensen, Clayton
M., Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald. "What Is Disruptive
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Apr. 2017. <https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation>.
Siva, Zach.
"Turn it Off: Cell Phones and Concert Culture." The Huffington
Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 02 June 2014. Web. 22 Apr. 2017.
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/north-by-northwestern/turn-it-off-cell-phones-a_b_5432289.html>.
"XO." Product
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<https://www.producthunt.com/posts/xo>.
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