The rising popularity of the image in social media has further transformed the way we share our lives with one another.
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“This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment,” said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, and we are “turning photography into a communication medium.”
Not surprisingly, the largest social networking companies are spending billions of dollars to be the place where consumers latch onto these visual nods. They know the stakes. While it might seem that Yahoo’s Flickr, Facebook, which also owns Instagram, and Twitter are fighting to become the ultimate online photo album or video vault, these companies are really fighting to provide the service for the newest way to communicate. If they miss that shift, they risk irrelevancy....
Another quote that nicely sets the table for this must-read article:
"So isn’t this all bad for society? Another blow for the English language where children won’t even bother to communicate in LOL-speak anymore?
“We’re tiptoeing into a potentially very deep and interesting new way of communicating,” said Mitchell Stephens, author of “The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word,” and a journalism professor at New York University. “And as with anything, when you tiptoe in, you start in the shallow waters.”
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