The Photography is the Message – Digitization, Canadians & Marshall McLuhan
As we reflect on the 30th anniversary of the death of scholar and philosopher Marshall McLuhan, we reflect on the role of media in our lives and marvel at his eerily accurate predictions.
Many of these predictions perfectly apply to our work at Transcontinental's Rastar in new media, photography and communications. McLuhan mused in the sixties that in the future we’d all be connected in real-time, with messages flowing back and forth, as if we sat side by side. Doesn’t this sound familiar to you, my tweeting, texting & IM’ing friends? This web of sharing, creativity and collaboration, spun thanks to digital media and the internet, is itself more interesting and important than any content created (a.k.a. ‘the medium IS the message’). When the medium is photography, McLuhan’s specific quotes on the subject were very pointed. He called the photography used in advertising and media during the sixties a ‘brothel without walls,’ which still rings true considering the transformative power in the hands of whoever wields a camera lens. Long before photoshopping, airbrushing and other virtual fibs, McLuhan noted photography’s ability to deceive: “To say that the camera cannot lie merely underlines the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.“
In 1994, fourteen years after the death of McLuhan, the first series of digital cameras took the consumer market by storm. Now that digital photography is sixteen years old, we can reflect on the impact of digital photography, the web and the prevalence of sharing images easily and instantaneously. This past October, the 4 billionth image was uploaded to Flickr, while the largest photo-sharing site in the world, Facebook, boats average monthly uploads of 2.5 billion photographs among its 400 million active users.
At Rastar, we recently witnessed how Canadians experienced their first Olympics through a digital photography lens. With over 50,000 pre-registrants within 4 days of the Olympics ‘Memories’ photo site launch, Canadians leapt at an opportunity to put a personal touch on memorabilia, with photo journals and posters emblazoned with users’ own snapshots. McLuhan would likely feel vindicated if he could witness the extreme speed and cyclical nature of new media, thanks to digitization and the internet. Today, Canadians aren’t just passively watching a sporting event on television or online, they’re texting, tweeting or blogging about the matches, and then taking their event photographs, often snapped from a mobile phone, and uploading them within seconds for their friends and family to enjoy.
Do you think that this new cycle of creating and sharing me-first media bring with it increasing narcissism, as many post-McLuhan cultural theorists have cautioned? Personally, I think that there will always be Canadians with a passion for photography, those who can capture the essence of their subject in a portrait or who have an eye to perfectly frame a landscape, regardless of how many glamour-shot profile pictures are uploaded to Facebook. For the sake of Canadian photography’s future and in honour of our media maven Marshall, let’s stay cautiously optimistic.
Melisa Jeffers is Senior Vice-President of Business and Corporate Development for Rastar, a Transcontinental Company, (www.rastar.com) which is a North American leader in print on demand solutions and social expression products. As a critical part of the Transcontinental Marketing Communications Sector, Rastar’s expertise result in robust solutions that help businesses provide their customers with highly personalized experiences.
Melisa Jeffers, Senior VP Business and Corporate Development, Rastar, a Transcontinental Company
