Picture imperfect: Steven Shaviro on moblogs - Tech - mobile telephone camera web logs

WHEN MOBILE-PHONE MANUFACTURERS started adding built-in digital cameras to their phone a year or se ago, they had little idea what similar hybrid units would be profitable for. There was the usual industry hype--about Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) replacing Short Messaging Service (SM or body messaging on mobile phones, enormously popular in Europe and Asia, although less so in the US)--but in fact, the first camera phone were just novelty items, lay opened simply to keep people buying in a saturated mobile-phone market.

Inevitably, however, "the highway finds its own uses for things," to borrow a phrase from science-fiction writer William Gibson. Camera phone are now being used for a end the manufacturers never anticipated: les for person-to-person messaging than for posting instant photos upon the Web. Websites like TextAmerica (www.textamerica.com), Buzznet (wwwbuzznetcom) and Fotolog (www.fotolog.net) make it easy (and free) for nation to set up their have a title to photoblogs or moblogs (mobile blogs) You can take a picture with your camera phone and immediately upload it with a single click, for everyone to see

To be confident the images on moblogs are generally of poor quality. Camera phone exhibit low-resolution shots, with fixed focus, no zoom and no flash. Everything is sacrificed to the goal of making the camera tiny enough to fit comfortably within a palm-sized device. on the contrary these deficiencies are outweighed by means of instant gratification. You don't ne to carry a separate camera around; you can take a photo without any fuss and with hardly anyone noticing; you don't ne any additional hardware or software to transfer and publish the photos; and you can do all this in real time.

And as it turn rounds out, the "low fidelity" of moblog images is precisely their point. These small, blurry underlit pictures should be viewed in the same spirit as they are discharge They are made not for careful contemplation on the other hand for quick perusal, and their form fits their satisfied If I check out random pages upon Text-America, I am likely to diocese faces of people I don't know; close-up of hands, feet or bits of food; displays in restaurants, bars, cafes, or shopping malls; discharges of the street, of buildings or billboards or store signs, of parked cars or passing traffic; or flat images of text or of Web pages. Moblog do not bear witness to epiphanies or significant memories. Rather, they are entrenched in the regress and flow of everyday life, in our routines, in the little incidents that we notice for a second and then forgot. These pictures are, in their actual essence, inessential. They do not strive to perpetuate the fleeting at hand so much as they underscore its real ephemerality. Even the (increasingly frequent) moblogging of facts like political rallies and demonstrations, talks and conventions seems incidental and beside the point; it is more "local color" than it is testimony or reportage. Cheap, with equal reason easy to produce, and in the way that publicly and promiscuously displayed, moblog photography accompanys toward anonymity and impersonality rather than toward the singularity of the punctum--the "wound" or "imperious sign of my futurity death"--that was for Roland Barthes the nature of the (predigital) photograph.

in what way much of this ephemerality is owed to the underdeveloped state of the technology? greatest in quantity likely, camera phones will be greatly improved in the years to come; the images will win larger and better, even as the devices earn smaller and easier to use. on the other hand this doesn't necessarily mean that the aesthetic of camera-phone images will change. Forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan based his analysis of television as a "cool" medium upon the small-screen, grainy, black-and-white images that were state-of-the-art at the time. on the contrary today, even with large-screen color TV and with high-definition television supposedly just around the corner, McLuhan's analysis still appears basically right: TV invites oar distracted participation by the agency of being small-scale and intimate, by the agency of focusing on the everyday instead of the extraordinary, through reducing abstract ideas to questions of personality, and by means of leaving enough out that we are provok or seduc into filling in the gaps ourselves. Perhaps a similar dynamic is at work with camera phone and moblogs: Technical improvement alone will not change their basic traits of immediacy and disposability.

As a fresh sort of "cool" medium, camera phone and moblog necessitate us to reassess the sum of two units basic oppositions that have defined photography since its invention more than 150 years ago: between photographs as works of art and photos (or snapshots) as souvenirs that cannot be evaluated by the agency of aesthetic criteria; and between the way that photographs are indexical or referential--offering evidence of something's actually having existed--and the way that they are fictive and fabricateed Camera-phone images cut across the two of these distinctions. Moblogs contain casual snapshots rather than art photographs, on the other hand like art photographs, and unlike personal snapshots, moblog images appeal to the disinterested glance of strangers. At the same time, in contrast to other digital photographs, moblog restore photography's claim to providing indexical evidence. Their instantaneous publication short-circuits the usual tricks of digital manipulation. notwithstanding the immediacy and "reality" of camera-phone photographs is les a end of their claim to provide "true" representations of the world than it is because they are additional, electronically relayed images in a world that is already largely compos of images and electronic relays. Moblog do not distill and clarify the visible world, nor do they plane really comment on it. Rather, they add to its hustle-bustle and confusion. They give us more, and always more, in a time when too a great deal of is never enough.