November 22, 2008

Still photographs and videoclips continue to proliferate, replicate, metastacize, across the Web. We cannot keep track of all the private photo albums that become instantly public, swelling the photo-sharing venues; last night’s party and runway snaps that permeate the paparazzi sites; the plentitude of “Cheese” shots that are perpetually refreshed on MySpace and FaceBook pages.

This month Google announced it was providing low-res scans of millions of photos from the legendary LIFE Picture Collection - and selling digital prints, framed, for $79.99 each. Google Earth, with its satellite images of American property, coast to coast, continues to serve up everyone’s private domains for public consumption. (There is even a mock-Google site that shows various Biblical scenes, as if viewed from a divine perspective.)

Anyone with a libido and laptop can log onto youporn.com, a collection of amateur or professional X-rated videoclips that has a higher weekly viewership than CNN.com. Talk about a hard-core fan base. The short text that accompanies the very first clip up on the site, right now, right this evening – the porn videos are displayed in row after row and page after page – reveals that the clip first went up today and has already been viewed more than 28,000 times, which was the population of the Midwest suburb I grew up in, back in the day. (On the site, there are offers to link up with hotties in my very town; I assume the photos and emails provided are generic, a tease. But the intimate, even oppressive, locality of it – listing my town because the site “reads” my computer’s GPS coordinates – makes me shudder.) I’ll save you - and me - the embarrassment and won’t link to it.

It’s no wonder, amid all this clutter and optical gluttony, that visual taste on the Internet keeps decaying, that obscenity and snuff keep finding wider audiences. Which might account for why a college serial killer would stop in the middle of his spree to go to his local post office to mail off a video suicide note to NBC News. Or why a kid, as happened this week, would videotape his own suicide for the wide Web world to see (and possibly view his act as a cry for help - and phone in and stop him). I cannot bring myself to even search for (let alone watch) the clip, which, like the hostage-beheading videos earlier this decade, marks another nadir in the history of the medium. I’ll save you the horror and won’t link to it.

Like the scientists who harnessed the power of the atom and have been haunted by Pandora ever since, we’ve created, with Web-dispensed imagery, a delivery system that is sometimes too explosive for its own good.

Take a look at the new LIFE search engine on Google. A viewer has to really hunt for the photographer’s credit. It’s as if these decontextualized, low-resolution, tepidly toned pictures were not taken by men and women, but by old mechanical cameras – for electronic computers to view.

Woe, the humanity.