Out shopping on an Autumn Saturday afternoon, a spectacular rainbow appeared over Islington. And on every street corner there was someone taking a picture with their cameraphone. A perfect example of how convergent technologies create brand new behaviours, as well as enhancing existing ones.
Most of those people taking pictures probably didn’t explicitly choose a cameraphone – the mobile photography revolution was virtually pure technology push by handset manufacturers and network operators. But once armed by default with a reasonable quality, zero-cost-per-click camera they’ve created new usages that never featured in the all-too-predictable MMS launch campaigns (it was all Beckham and babies from what I remember, never happy slapping or lunch).
Chris Heathcote sums up the digital photo effect as “more people taking more pictures, more people looking at pictures, and more conversations started from photos” – and it’s not just more, more, more, it’s different, different, different.
Matt Edgar writes here 