fisharepeopletoo

Crafting

I pass this boat every other Sunday on my way to play football.

The top picture I took without permission, but for the next two I had to get closer, which meant asking if it was OK, a trickier exchange than just pointing my camera phone, snapping and scarpering.

I tried to persuade the owner of the craft, who is eyeing me slightly suspiciously in the first photo, to stand next to his creation, but he wasn't having any of it, saying he didn't know who might see it and come looking for him.

I thought about telling him it was going on the Internet, but that no-one would see it, but if for whatever reason you've decided to live on a boat, with no electricity, in the middle of nowhere, the last thing you want to hear is that you're going to be on the World Wide Web.

It wasn't any sense of journalism or photography that made go to the trouble of negotiating for better pictures, so much as thinking that they'd make nicer decorations for this web site.

A little bit of crafting of my own.
 

We Are What We Feet

I thought , thought, somebody somewhere must be doing it.

Our Boys Took A Hell Of A Beating

Geoloqus forges ahead.

Despite being jealous, I'm happy to see it.

Place filtered asynchronous text based conversation services on mobile phones might, just might, create something of value, and Geoloqus takes some big steps in what, to me, is the right direction.

Or Sleepy, Or Worn Out

Words get tired too.

We should help them.

By not using the same ones as everyone else.

All the time.

If It Didn't Already Exist, Someone Would Have Had To Invent It

What to do with those photos of the Pope on your mobile phone?

Get one of these digital picture frames, add a Near Field Communication chip, so you can bring up the photo on your phone screen and tap the phone against the frame to transfer it, add an accelerometer (or whatever some sort of tilty type gizmo is called) so you can turn the page to the next photo by tilting the frame, to give it a comfortable family album feel, then finally limit the number of photos it can store on its memory to fifty, so you can sit side by side with someone and look at their holiday/wedding/baby photos knowing you're not going to be there for weeks.

Pope Mobile

Once you’ve taken your photo of the Pope with a camera phone, what do you do with it?

If you’re devout, or even superstitious, you can’t delete it. 

Your mobile becomes a holy relic.

(And you can’t throw the phone away. In thirty years time attics all over Italy will be full of dusty 2004 model camera phones)

Something similar was reported in a study of camera phone use in Japan:

“A female college student, aged 23, describes a photo she took as an omamori (good luck amulet). In Japan, people often carry omamori simply to have a trusted spirit close by. This student sees her photo as a similar kind of presence.

    Iinterviewee: …There are seven students at that farewell party. I took the photo of my professor’s profile while he was talking.
    Okabe: Did you send or use this picture?
    Informant: No, this photo is just an omamori. “

[Emergent Social Practices, Situations and Relations through Everyday Camera Phone Use,  OKABE, Daisuke]

People may keep their Pope Mobiles as personal devotional comforts, and not often show them to anyone.

If they do share them, it’ll be analogue, rather than digital. These are “Impress your mates down the convent” photos, which will be shared by passing round a phone.

In both cases, the online photo sharing, tagging, moblog, life-archive model of sharing and storing seems to be missing something.

For our Pope Mobile photos, we want to be able to carry around and hand around.

(The notion of passing a devotional object, whether a camera phone with a photo of the Pope or a family album of baby photos, from hand to hand, of making a gift, a ritual, an offering of it, seems quite important somehow.)

How Many Popes Does It Take

Here are some photos of the dead Pope:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13632876@N00/tags/morto/

And here's the BBC's photo of a forest of camera phone snapping hands:

What to make of this, if anything at all.

I guess the first question would be, when the last Pope died did everyone troop past with their Polaroids?

If not, what's the difference?

Weight of numbers? And having the equipment to hand? When one person plucks up the nerve, everyone can instantly follow suit.

Anything more?

That thicket of camera phones is, to me, funny, irreverent and liberating.

After all, the Pope is only a dead man to his family and close friends.

To the rest of us, he's a media event.

It's just that now, we've all got media capture devices, haven't we?

Anyone Know Any Good Pope Jokes?

Is this very funny?

Talk The Walk

"The more I traveled in the country, the more I came to understand that virtually every location -- creek, molehill, cinder cone, hot spring, forested area, and (ancient or present) farm had a specific name."

A really nice little piece about "the naming process [as] local, embodied, idiosyncratic, or personal." in comparison to standardisation and GPSery.