In an instant

I just got back from a conference in Portorož, Slovenia. As a photographer I occasionally work for http://www.finance-akademija.si/, which is a business academy run by Finance, a financial newspaper here in Slovenia. When I first started doing these jobs, photographing the events, I was surprised how active the PR team of the organizers was. I got used to it by now, but it was hard work back then (and still is sometimes). Let me elaborate (once again I am going to bring the internet into the story).

I don't know how this was done back in the days, in the era before the internet as we know it today, but things run quite a bit differently these days, I presume. Most of the time, as a photographer, I am present in the show room where the lectures are going on. I take pictures of speakers, the audience and basically everything else which catches my eye. As soon as a section of lectures and case studies finishes, I get a call from the PR lady asking for photos so they can put them on display on their website. The photos are on the website merely minutes, if not seconds, after I take them (mind you that I don't have the equipment to wirelessly transfer photos from my camera to a computer, otherwise it would be even faster). Everything is done almost instantaneously. Before the speaker finishes his presentation, he is already on the web for others to see. I don't know how PR articles were written before the internet era and how long it took to publish them, but I will surely ask the organizers of these events the next time I see them.

The point I am trying to make is that we are living in a instantaneous world these days. Everything has to be done right away, as soon as possible. The sooner, the better. The web made this possible, with the digitalisation of data. Data, in any form, can be sent across the world in seconds. If we look at the case I just described, the time to publish PR articles has decreased dramatically. I imagine the articles were published in the next day's newspaper, together with rolls of film containing negatives of the photographs which had to be taken to the editors (or sent via the postal services) and developed. So basically we are talking half a day's time, more or less, at it's best. Today, this takes a couple of seconds. Instant data.

Everything happens faster these days, which in my mind is a product of new media. We strive to make things faster so we can do more work. The tempo of life has increased radically and our society has adopted this new way of hyper production. It seems that things were quite simpler back in the days. Me, I am a product of this hyper world, as I grew up with the web, so it is hard for me to compare both eras. Nevertheless, I often hear stories of my parents and other older folks how things were less stressful back then. And quite frankly, this worries me a bit. The previous generation has experienced this cultural shock in later phases of their life. We were brought up with it basically from our childhood. And the world isn't slowing down, on the contrary, things are beginning to roll even faster as technologies advance. Will we cope with all this? Will we adapt the same way the previous generation did? Hard to say.

I have always said that I will try to cope with technology until my time comes and that I will not be overrun by it. But I am not so certain any more to be honest. I guess that depends on what kind of a person you are, but with all the technological breakthroughs it will surely be a challenge. Can the world get any faster than it already is? Sure. But when will it stop? Will it stop at all? We'll just have to wait and see.

This is the end of this post. After I click the "publish" button I have to perform my online check-in for my flight to Barcelona tomorrow, so I don't have to wait in line at the airport.