​Something is changing

I've been lucky enough to walk past the Eiffel Tower every morning and afternoon that I go to work for the last ten years or so.  It's an extremely popular attraction and gets nearly 7 million visitors a year.​

And they've started to jump.  Literally.  Into the air.​

This is new.  During the first eight years, at least, of my two daily walks past La Dame de Fer I must have seen several thousand photos being taken.  Not one of them involved the a tourist jumping in front of the tower.  Now maybe a quarter of the photos taken involve a leap, folded knees and outstretched arms.  

​I can't prove it without more research than I'm prepared to do but I suspect that most of these photos find their way onto Facebook or into Instagram.  The 'leap in front ​​​of a tourist attraction' is endlessly reproduced in what we are encouraged to refer to as a meme, ​which is what happens when millions of us go 'me too, me too, me me me me meme' without thinking.

​And then, as they say, it gets to be in our DNA.

​Now I'm not saying those old photos of the Eiffel Tower, the ones taken with instamatics where the sky is an unnatural yellow-green, were better ​photos.  ​They weren't, even when the whole family except the photographer was posed carefully and everybody smiled at the same time, which was rare.  But their function was different.  They were essentially private objects whereas the photos on your mobile phone are public statements- part of the branding of self ​we are encouraged to do, and which is (let us be honest) one of the main purposes of this blog.

If I were cynical and given to hyperbole I would call this the Facebookisation of the Self.  As I'm polite and deferential I'll merely observe that I don't wish to live all my life on the agora.​

I would continue, but this is already too long for a blog post.  My own facebookisation means I find it hard now even to watch a film on television without an ipad on my lap.  I want to discuss 'curating' as understood by tumblr and pinterest and whether this damages creativity, and I will.  ​I will, sometime soon, ​but right now I have to check my email and update my twitter feed.

​TTFN, LOLs ;-)

J xxx

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