Redesigning and re-instrumentalising activities (Task #13)

Among the activities that our civilization has been carrying out until now in rather “traditional” ways, there is one that is constantly driving my attention for a strange peculiarity.
The world of photography has in fact changed in the last 20 years in significant ways due to the introduction of digital camera sensors and processors. Sincethen new, more sofisticated cameras have been produced with the purpose of constantly delivering new and more accurated reproductions of the reality.
What has changed since then in DSLR and compact cameras has always been a matter of more and more precisereproduction of pictures, higher resolutions, faster chips and less noisy sensors.
What i think is truly, deeply missing in this equation is what Smartphone producers have been so cleverly (perhaps even a bit unconsciously) doing since they allowed a camera to exist on the same device that can connect to the internet: a true possibility of sharing the taken pictures right away from the camera to the internet.
In fact what i’m proposing here is to re-instrumentalize compact cameras and DSLR cameras with the same possibilities that are offered by smartphone cameras. The step seems so small but it is not. Traditional cameras have been always perceived as an instrument on its own, capable only of capturing the light and giving the chanche to the photographer to reproduce it on printed paper. This was and is partially true, because in our digital society pictures have gained a different role and their main location is now the screen of laptops televisions and mobile phones. If we consider this it doesn’t surprise to know that applications like Instagr.am have been downloaded more than a million times in less than a month and that flickr, one of the most important photosharing social network, has declared that most of the pictures they receive each month are now being produced by mobile devices.

Most popular Cameras in the Flickr community as from May 3rd, 2011

The use of traditional cameras could (and should) be changed by adding a digital “social” layer to them, that would allow the user to instantly share pictures over the web, perhaps through a 3G/Wifi connection. In this way users won’t need anymore to download their pictures on the computer all the time, but will be able to manage them on the cloud.