One thing Instagram’s done for me (or to me): It’s made me much more prone to editing images on my phone. Which means I now have more data on the real-world equivalent of Charles Stross’ speculative incident in the beginning of Accelerando:
[Manfred is] standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs [smart glasses that now seem like a prediction of Google Glasses] powered up…. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. (emphasis added)
I’ve written before about what the hell kind of UI he’s using to tell his systems to actually do all this stuff. One thing I noted was that, working on a modern smartphone, “Cropping is pretty much out of the question, although someone could write an app for it.” But that was two years ago, when I was using a Palm Pre… over 6 months before Instagram even launched their first product.
Fast-forward to this Monday. I was walking down Market Street and saw a statue that I felt like grabbing a picture of. I took the pic with my phone’s standard camera app. Then I decided, what the heck, why not post it on Instagram? When you import a photo from your Android Gallery into Instagram, it “gives you the opportunity” (i.e., forces you) to crop the image so it fits their 1:1 aspect ratio. While I was doing the cropping, I noticed: There was some text in there that was really kind of distracting. I wanted it out of there. Read More