Just a little shopping

There are a couple of puns in that headline. This past weekend, while my wife was looking over a selection of sweaters at Macy’s, I pulled a Blackberry Pearl out of my shirt pocket, walked over to a balcony overlooking the dinnerware displays and took a picture. I sent the picture to my e-mail address, and upon returning home, opened it up and tweaked it in Photoshop ("shopping") to create a miniaturization effect.

Technology has made the process of taking, retouching and displaying photographs to a worldwide audience much, much smaller than it used to be. Here you are now, somewhere in the world, looking at what I saw at Macy’s last weekend through my own particular interpretation of the scene. How cool is that?

Many barriers, like distance, size, time and cost are now miniature versions of what they used to be thanks to technology. What I fear most, however, about the smallness of the world, is that somehow we will all become smaller right along with the technology. Instead of the connections helping us to get to know and understand each other, we become further entrenched in ourselves to the exclusion of others, and what was once hailed as the unifier of the world becomes a zillion separate channels spewing self-absorbed messages to ever smaller fragments of the population who will agree with us thereby providing the illusion that we are bigger than we really are.

No evidence of that happening on the interwebs so far. Nope.

Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.