Brian - It does seem like technological gimmickry can be a trap, doesn't it? It's hard to resist. Yet there's something about it, or maybe about the way we tend to use it, that crowds out actual imagination. The final art/entertainment thing often stuffs the senses to bursting, yet leaves the imagination starved. Weird. I wonder why. But I certainly recognize the phenomenon you're talking about ...

Lindenen -- I've seen the fake celebrity nudes and thought they were funny. But I hadn't thought about doing it to friends. That's a hilarious way to cause some college havoc. Plus, someone somewhere is going to use it as a premise for a thriller. Why not you?

Jonathan -- True. But not many people actually did it, funnily enough. It's an interesting thing you're spotlighting. Videotaping is another example. A lot of the timeshifting people do with Tivos today could be done with VCRs a couple of decades ago. (I did it, in fact -- I haven't watched TV straight off the cable in decades. Used to tape what I wanted to see and watch it on tape. Now I hard-drive it and watch it off the hard drive.) But very few people actually did it. There's something about the Tivo set up that makes it so very, very much easier that a tipping-point thing occurs, and suddenly it's part of mass culture and popular behavior. The same seems to have occurred with Photoshopping and cutting and pasting. You could always do it, but until the computers very few people did...

Tatyana -- Life as a Photoshopped image: bliss! Or potential bliss, anyway. Looking forward to those images!

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on September 15, 2005 10:14 AM

MB,

Not many people did it because 1) it's a lot of work, 2) it requires a lot of skill and 3) before the Internet you couldn't email the results to your buddies, so you might stick them up on your office wall for everyone to see instead. So I've heard, anyway.

Posted by: Jonathan on September 15, 2005 10:19 PM






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