Image as an information unit
On the NYT blog, I came across a rather curious post: Social Media Images Form a New Language Online .
The author argues on the transfer of information through images. Indeed, why write a lot of words if you can show one “talking” photo that the audience “thinks” faster than they scan through several paragraphs of text, gradually grasping the meaning of what they read.
It would seem that nothing new, a hackneyed truth: the visual is better than text, we all love to consume photo content, but ... Paradox: there are very few photos on the Net! Immediately after the World Hockey Championship, I was looking for fresh photos and found not so much, and this despite the global scale of the event. Photographers take thousands of photos, but they donate a few, and they don’t immediately go into Google Image. One hope for social networks. This is where the bread does not feed, but let me once again post a cool picture or photo of your breakfast. But in social networks it is not so easy to find photos of an event - not all users accompany their photos with correct comments, not to mention the use of hashtags. It turns out that there are photos, there are a lot of them, but at the same time - not enough.
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I will give a simple illustrative example: sculpt a simple program that monitors certain hashtags on Twitter, and “pull” the photos we need, for example, about the Universiade - http://kazan2013.tweetpics.ru/ As a result, using tweetpics we managed to collect , 4,225 unique photos that are not yet in search engines. In the instagram on this hashtag there are even more unique photos, but for the experiment there was no task to cover all the channels at once.
Some more photos (but not all) can be “pulled out” using services like sprixi.com, risenet.iti.upv.es/rise or tineye.com. It may help to solve the problem of Google Similar Images , but only partially, since the search algorithm will be based on the usual Google Images, and photos from social networks will be indexed poorly.
After all, it's damn little, do you agree? Especially, returning to the article mentioned at the beginning of the post, against the background of the argument that photos from social networks form a new way of communicating online, and even more so - a new way of transmitting information.
As it was before: a photographic image is an emotion (“Stop, a moment, you are beautiful!”), A repository of memories. As it is now (mainly in social networks): photography is an independent information unit, which is valuable not by itself because of the artistic or emotional component, but due to the fact that it carries certain, specific information. Photography as a means of communication. The simplest questions “What are you doing?” And “Where are you?” Are now easier to answer with a photo in MMS and iMessage than with text. Photodialog comes to replace the usual "text messages". And we do not store these photos, we looked at them, perceived the message emanating from them and, roughly speaking, forgot.
In addition, there is no language barrier in communication with photos. What you don’t want or don’t get (due to lack of knowledge of the language) can be expressed in words by correcting the picture. Yes, transmitting information through visual images is not new (cave paintings of cavemen, ancient frescoes and mosaics, etc.), but never before have people communicated with these images as they do now. The world is getting closer, and people are getting closer, because photography, and in general, any image is a universal language that everybody can understand. And I completely agree with Professor Robin Kelsey from Harvard mentioned in the NYT post, who says that the turning point comes when we move away from photography as a way of recording and storing moments of the past to photography as a means of communication.
And you know, if you let go of the thought and fantasize a little, then perhaps the evolution of photography into a means of communication is the first, shy step to something bigger? For example, to the development of such a method of transmitting information through visual images, such as ... telepathy ( article in the topic ), that is, without using any technical means at all, roughly speaking - directly.
And in conclusion - some statistics. According to CTIA data published this year, in 2012, 2.19 trillion SMS were sent and sent, which is 5% less than in 2011. At the same time, the share of MMS and multimedia messages containing photos and videos increased by 41% last year.
So how else to search and collect the most popular content on the Web today - photos, except for the methods I mentioned in the post? Any ideas?
The author argues on the transfer of information through images. Indeed, why write a lot of words if you can show one “talking” photo that the audience “thinks” faster than they scan through several paragraphs of text, gradually grasping the meaning of what they read.
It would seem that nothing new, a hackneyed truth: the visual is better than text, we all love to consume photo content, but ... Paradox: there are very few photos on the Net! Immediately after the World Hockey Championship, I was looking for fresh photos and found not so much, and this despite the global scale of the event. Photographers take thousands of photos, but they donate a few, and they don’t immediately go into Google Image. One hope for social networks. This is where the bread does not feed, but let me once again post a cool picture or photo of your breakfast. But in social networks it is not so easy to find photos of an event - not all users accompany their photos with correct comments, not to mention the use of hashtags. It turns out that there are photos, there are a lot of them, but at the same time - not enough.
')
I will give a simple illustrative example: sculpt a simple program that monitors certain hashtags on Twitter, and “pull” the photos we need, for example, about the Universiade - http://kazan2013.tweetpics.ru/ As a result, using tweetpics we managed to collect , 4,225 unique photos that are not yet in search engines. In the instagram on this hashtag there are even more unique photos, but for the experiment there was no task to cover all the channels at once.
Some more photos (but not all) can be “pulled out” using services like sprixi.com, risenet.iti.upv.es/rise or tineye.com. It may help to solve the problem of Google Similar Images , but only partially, since the search algorithm will be based on the usual Google Images, and photos from social networks will be indexed poorly.
After all, it's damn little, do you agree? Especially, returning to the article mentioned at the beginning of the post, against the background of the argument that photos from social networks form a new way of communicating online, and even more so - a new way of transmitting information.
As it was before: a photographic image is an emotion (“Stop, a moment, you are beautiful!”), A repository of memories. As it is now (mainly in social networks): photography is an independent information unit, which is valuable not by itself because of the artistic or emotional component, but due to the fact that it carries certain, specific information. Photography as a means of communication. The simplest questions “What are you doing?” And “Where are you?” Are now easier to answer with a photo in MMS and iMessage than with text. Photodialog comes to replace the usual "text messages". And we do not store these photos, we looked at them, perceived the message emanating from them and, roughly speaking, forgot.
In addition, there is no language barrier in communication with photos. What you don’t want or don’t get (due to lack of knowledge of the language) can be expressed in words by correcting the picture. Yes, transmitting information through visual images is not new (cave paintings of cavemen, ancient frescoes and mosaics, etc.), but never before have people communicated with these images as they do now. The world is getting closer, and people are getting closer, because photography, and in general, any image is a universal language that everybody can understand. And I completely agree with Professor Robin Kelsey from Harvard mentioned in the NYT post, who says that the turning point comes when we move away from photography as a way of recording and storing moments of the past to photography as a means of communication.
And you know, if you let go of the thought and fantasize a little, then perhaps the evolution of photography into a means of communication is the first, shy step to something bigger? For example, to the development of such a method of transmitting information through visual images, such as ... telepathy ( article in the topic ), that is, without using any technical means at all, roughly speaking - directly.
And in conclusion - some statistics. According to CTIA data published this year, in 2012, 2.19 trillion SMS were sent and sent, which is 5% less than in 2011. At the same time, the share of MMS and multimedia messages containing photos and videos increased by 41% last year.
So how else to search and collect the most popular content on the Web today - photos, except for the methods I mentioned in the post? Any ideas?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/187076/
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