Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
..finally, some good news! (bada bing)
To see the full gallery “Chipwrappers” please click here
This week’s theme is the humble newspaper who’s dominance as the go-to format for current affairs is dwindling massively as its digital counterpart flourishes. This is due to accessibility and ease and the fact that its basically free. The other difference between the two is that whereas in the past “yesterday’s news was tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper” the headlines of the internet remain for ever. It used to be that crimes and scandals soon drifted from the public consciousness as the papers they were printed on were thrown out to degrade and disintegrate, never to be seen again.
Nowadays, if you are involved in anything insidious your reputation will be tarnished forever. Just try and google “julian assange” and not come up with “rape”. The irony is that digital news that never disappears actually feels like it has less impact than its paper predecessor as it is digested in a relentless non-stop current affairs feed. People tend to move on from one catastrophic event to the next without even reducing the flick speed of their fingers across their heavily stroked touch screens. The thumbprints might remain but the information has been lost.
Why is it the more we try to consume the less we seem to be able to retain? In trying to keep up we are actually grinding to a halt. The weight of the world is dragging us down as we attempt to absorb everything that is going on. Despite reading about disasters and atrocities it feels like the greatest calamity would be if we might miss a hashtag moment. There might be an argument to suggest that genuinely taking on board the impact of a single event and the lives it affects would be somehow better than skim-reading everything…time to stop flicking and start feeling.