Thinking about Facebook as the New Photo Album
During Christmas time my grandfather passed away and I became in charge of putting together a slide show for the wake. My family and I did what most people do when a family member passes; pull out every photo album in the house. Not only did we have our box of pictures and albums, but also my grandmothers and aunts photo albums as well. At a lot of funerals people do big collages, but we decided that instead of having a bunch of collages I would scan all the images that we wanted to use in and run it on a T.V. at the funeral home.
As we flipped through thousands of pictures for me to scan in, I had to rip out hundreds of pictures off of pages with sticky backed paper, scotch tape, masking tape, and old picture frames. Every time something would not come easily off a page I would cringe, breathe, and slowly pull 50 year old pictures off a page to scan. The several hours I spent doing this got me thinking about how someone would easily put a slide show together for someone who had a facebook and why facebook is so successful.
Now, I realize none of these ideas are “new” but as facebook becomes more prominent and necessary to the internet, it will become the photo album of our time. If you are a facebook user, you know the power it has to randomly suck an hour or two away from your life without realizing it. The reason for that is the ability to plow through someones entire facebook library of photographs in only a few minutes. It’s all in front of you, and all you have to do is click next to keep going. And for people of my generation or earlier, their entire lives will become available on facebook, especially with the way that facebook intends to change the way we use the internet. It is already happening with the thousands of applications and plug-ins for facebook. Right now I have lastfm, friend feed, twittter, two blogs, and my calendar uploaded to facebook for all of my “friends” to see, and I don’t have as much integration as a lot of other users do.
With all of these things, included with the sometimes thousands of pictures people tend to have, it is slowly becoming more than just a photo album, but a way to really get to know someone without ever meeting them.
But I had a point before I segwayed into the thousands of ways that we can integrate everything in life to facebook. A few things that putting together this slide show made me think about in terms of photography is that more and more we are veering away from physical print and pushing more towards a screen. It sort of blew me away that a funeral home had an HDTV with a DVI cable to connect a computer for a slide show. The problem with facebook is that they turn you pictures into something like 50kb which is horrible for print, but could easily work on a screen size. If someone took all the pictures they wanted from facebook and turned them into a slide show it would be both easy, and would still look good. Facebook has become a way for people to take their entire digital photo albums and organize them into one place for all their friends to see. There was never a solution for the endless amounts of digital photographs we tend to take and facebook is filling that void.