A big news story this week was the beginning of the trial in the lawsuit brought by sportscaster Erin Andrews against Michael David Barrett and both the Marriott International Hotels and Radisson Hotels. Barrett  filmed Andrews through peepholes at the Nashville Marriott and the Radisson Airport Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One of these videos, in which Andrews appears totally nude, was released over the internet on July 16, 2009 and quickly “went viral.”  Barrett was subsequently sentenced to thirty months in prison, three years of probation, $5,000 in fines, and $7,366 in restitution. He served his sentence at the Seattle Community Corrections and was released on July 3, 2012. In her lawsuit against Marriott, Andrews alleged that hotel employees gave Barrett the dates she would be at a hotel and a room next to hers. She is struggling to have the video removed from the internet.

These are briefly the facts. While we can admire Ms. Andrew’s courage in taking on her abusers, the devastating consequence to her and her family psychologically is heart-wrenching. This kind of personal violation is overwhelming.

But I wanted to point out one unheard point. IT experts estimate that close to 17 Million people have viewed this video online. But recognize how this kind of prurient postings are presented to us. You have to click to see it. You have to seek it out. This is very much a sin of commission. On a broader level people complain all the time about the content of the internet. But we all share a part in it. So I want to suggest that there is a social contract at work – or really not working – here. When other filters fail, our planetary co-inhabitants, a.k.a other people, expect kind decency from us all to at the very least look away. In a world of digital image overload, we all need to be responsible viewers of photographs.

Social contracts are implicit in human society. The moral in Ms. Andrew’s story is the same as in the story of Lady Godiva and that greatest of all voyeurs, Peeping Tom, Tom bores a hole in his shutters – sound familiar? –  so that he might see Godiva naked, and he is struck blind. Fortunately for Mr. Barrett our sense of retribution has softened in the interval between the 12th century and today.

You have probably heard that life imitates art. Most notable is Oscar Wilde’s comment that:

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life“

I mention this because in the play and movie Auntie Mame, Mame’s husband, Beauregard Burnside, dies when they are on the Matterhorn, and he falls to his death trying to take a photograph of Mame on the mountain. That is “death by photography,” and today we have the subset “death by selfie.” This came to mind this week when a woman in India was rescued from a thirty foot deep well in which she had fallen while trying to take a selfie.

Not surprisingly there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to death and injuries by selfie. The most common accidents, like the woman in India, is leaning too far off  bridges, buildings, and mountains – like the Matterhorn. Another common theme is being killed by trains while taking a selfie standing on a railroad track.  I am suspicious that this is an attempt to have a train in the photo barreling down on one. Hello, people – not so smart! This certainly seems a variant on the Darwin Awards.

It appears unlikely that “death by selfie” has increased the number of “deaths by photography,” except in that there are more people taking photographs with cell phones than in “olden days” with “conventional” cameras. More significant, I suspect, is the danger of abstractedness. While the cell-phone and the taking of selfies increases connectedness with one’s greater community, it certainly abstracts the individual from his/her surroundings. “Death by selfie” is a small problem compared to the greater problem of “death by cell phone.” In 2012, 3,328 people were killed in automobile crashes in the United States, involving a distracted driver. An additional, 421,000 people were injured in motor vehicle crashes involving a distracted driver in 2012. There’s the epidemic.

And it also represents a clash between our hunger for technology and our ability to adapt and intercolate this technology into our conscious lives – emphasis on the word conscious. As we rocket towards the singularity, we are the weak link, and what we see is the need to automate cars more and more to compensate for distracted humans.

Figure 1 – Don Quixote in his Study, 1857, by Julia Margaret Cameron and in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

There is a prologue to the musical “Man of La Mancha” and then Cervantes grabs us with the words:

“May I set the stage? I shall impersonate a man.
Come, enter into my imagination and see him!“

And there he is in Figure 1. There is Don Quixote in his study as Imagined by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) in her 1857 photograph.

So fast forward, for several weeks I had been anticipating last Monday’s release of the movie “Jurassic World.”  It became available for rental and on Saturday I found time to watch it. The movie begins with images of the imaginary theme park Jurassic World and at about the moment of the attack of the pterodactyls I became struck by how real the images seemed. See for instance the mosasaurus eating a pterodactyl and like me forget everything that you know about these soaring reptiles and their precarious flight.  These scenes seemed, indeed were, photographs of what previously existed only in the mind. That is the beauty of modern digital photograph and its cousin digital video.

From the very beginning the word photograph carried with it a sense of authenticity. Of course that was misplaced, but it was there. And the very roots of photography in classic art meant that early photographers sought to imitate painting and so photographed the religious, the mythic, and the literary. Julia Margaret Cameron was a major practitioner of this art and her legacy is followed by the magic mysticism of modern day photographers like Beth Moon.

Recently I have been struck by what is called “Fantasy Photography,” which is not to be confused with boudoir photography. In fantasy photography the photographed person is integrated seamlessly into an other world, and you cannot quite be sure if you are really looking at a portrait reworked or a totally manufactured and created person and scene. It marvelously extends the possibilities and stretches the limits of the photograph.  There is a wonderful series of fantasy photographs by photographer Annie Leibovitz where she transforms celebrities into well known Disney Characters. And one of my favorites is Kristy Mitchell’s “Wonderland.” This typifies the marvelous transcendence of the genre into the magical, into the mythic. We seem to be looking at photograph of Mallory’s  “Nimue, the Lady of the Lake.” It conjures up Edward Burnes-Jones’ The Beguiling of Merlin (1872-1877). You may recognize his model, Jane Morris, from a previous blog. But as beautiful as the painting is, Ms. Mitchell’s  image is so much more. It is a photograph, and photographs have an implied truth. It is as if the photographer transcended reality and entered the realm of Mallory’s mind.

We have spoken often in this blog about the machine-to-human and human-to-machine aspects of the modern world as we approach the singularity. To me it is a matter of dealing with the inevitable. You’re not going to stop or reverse the trend. It is much like time and the tides, in that they wait for no man. And really, the issue seems to be not so much a resistance to change but a resistance to the speed of change, which prevents us from taking the usual time to process what is going on. Of course, that’s the whole point. Isn’t it?
This morning I read a fascinating piece by Sean Coughlin, Education Correspondnent on the BBC News entitled “Digital dependence ‘eroding human memory’” Now there’s a subject close to my heart and favorite theme.
According to a new study by Dr. Maria Wimber from the University of Birmingham  the trend of looking up information “prevents the build-up of long-term memories”. The study, examined the memory habits of 6,000 adults in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Not surprisingly, they found more than a third turn first to computers to recall information.

The big issue, of course, is what the long-term implications of such reliance are. And the problem that they identify is that push-button information can often be immediately forgotten. “Our brain appears to strengthen a memory each time we recall it, and at the same time forget irrelevant memories that are distracting us,” according to Dr Wimber.

A very marked observation is that among adults surveyed in the UK, 45% could recall their home phone number from the age of 10, while only 29% could remember their own children’s phone numbers and only 43% could remember their work number. This phenomenon has been dubbed “digital amnesia.” To modernize one of those Facebook postings people are so fond of, everyone has a photographic memory, some just don’t have RAM.

It has been argued that humans have evolved a new form of evolution, memetic evolution, where units of memory are created and passed on collectively. So the issue becomes whether the development by humans of digital memory – an extracorporeal form of memory is just a next logical step in this process of this super-evolution or whether we have mentally misstepped and lost our way. Losing your way in terms of evolution usually has catastrophic consequences. It has always struck me that there is a profound ignorance in the belief that we have somehow escaped the inevitable cycles of biological evolution.

Global warming is an example of this self-deception. Parts of the world are becoming precariously hot – precarious that is to support human life. Even a century’s view is myopic on a geological scale. If we predict doom and are a hundred years off in our predictions, the species is just as doomed, and along with it any arrogant view of having superseded biological evolution.