Month: October 2015

I was think­ing recent­ly about Medi­um and Word­Press, as I’ve start­ed cross-post­ing a few arti­cles from the lat­ter to the for­mer. Medium’s writ­ing inter­face real­ly is as easy to use as every­one says, but what I val­ue most is see­ing who has inter­act­ed with it: the names attached to the ‘rec­om­mends’, and the easy access to sta­tis­tics. I miss this when writ­ing on my Word­Press blogs, and it led me to con­sid­er how, with Jet­Pack, Word­Press could eas­i­ly make a site to aggre­gate self-host­ed con­tent into a Medi­um com­peti­tor.

Then I went to wordpress.com and found out that, qui­et­ly, that’s exact­ly what they have built. You can write posts on your self-host­ed blog that will be pub­lished to the cen­tralised site; you can ‘like’ and ‘share’ and fol­low authors to cre­ate your own feed of inter­est­ing con­tent, enhanced by fea­tured and rec­om­mend­ed posts. All the ingre­di­ents are there to be a Medi­um com­peti­tor, except that it’s all cur­rent­ly private—you need an account to cre­ate a feed, no con­tent is find­able by default.

I’m not sure how much of this Word­Press have announced, or even if mak­ing a pub­lic Medi­um com­peti­tor is their plan at all. But it’s inter­est­ing to see that all of the infra­struc­ture is in place for such a move—a decen­tralised Medi­um is an excit­ing notion.

There’s a pho­to that’s been doing the rounds on social media. It shows a crowd of peo­ple at an event, all of them using their mobile phones, pre­sum­ably as cam­eras to cap­ture the event. The excep­tion is an old lady at the front, who has no phone in her hands and is look­ing at the event direct­ly.

Peo­ple have been say­ing things like “A tru­ly won­der­ful pho­to­graph. We have for­got­ten how to live in the present”. But this is sim­ply some­one inter­pret­ing the pho­to­graph in a way that suits their bias­es. It’s a cheap trick. The lady in the cir­cle hasn’t (as far as I know) pub­licly stat­ed what she was doing, so absent that infor­ma­tion I can offer a few alter­na­tive cap­tions that are just as true:

Lady doesn’t own a camera phone, wishes she does.

Lady forgot to charge her camera phone battery before she left the house.

Lady is not engaged with what’s happening, is waiting for something more interesting.

Images in part derive their pow­er from the fact that we are exclud­ing so much of the world.

This pic­ture cap­tures a sin­gle moment in time: you can’t see what hap­pened before, or after. It’s also a sin­gle point in space; you can’t see what’s out of frame. If there is an objec­tive truth, it’s very unlike­ly to be present in a pho­to­graph offered with­out con­text.