Adidas, iPhones and all those photos you take

John V Willshire on September 21, 2009

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I bought a new pair of trainers yesterday.  Like five of the last six pairs I’ve bought, they were a pair of ‘classic’ style adidas.  I took this picture with a blog post in mind…

But what was the blog post to be about? 

It might have been a discourse on brand loyalty, of course. 

In a market of such wide and varied choice, to stick dogmatically to one brand shows a really well developed relationship between myself and Adidas, surely? 

Well, kind of.  I just so happen to think the soles are better than Converse, and they tend to be discounted heavily in sales at show stores like Offspring.  The latest pair cost me £35 down from £65.  Being Scottish, it would appear the only thing I’m loyal to is a good bargain.

Or indeed it might have been about apps replacing objects in our lives. 

I used the QuadCamera app to take this shot, which I found out about from Iain.  It takes four (or eight) sequential shots, much like the Lomo Action Sampler:

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Whilst the Lomo camera does one thing, uses film, and costs £25, the app costs £1.19 and of course shoots onto digital, meaning you can snap away happily as often as you like until you get the shot you want.

What I think we’re increasingly seeing is the digital world continuing to replace things from the physical world; it started with music, of course, then after CDs it’ll be DVDs… but the long term effect is that an app can be created to replace what a physical object used to. 

Skimming through my iPhone, I see you can get apps to replace cameras, diaries, notepads, pens, pencils, business cards, books, newspapers, torches, four-track recording devices, maps, dictaphones, percussive instruments, guitar tuners…

Good for me in the short term, of course.  But if no-one is selling this stuff anymore, and no one is making stuff either… then surely there’s a big whole in the economy opening up somewhere?

But maybe the post wasn’t about that either.

Maybe it was going to be about the sheer amount of stuff we make and share. 

I have hundreds and hundreds of snaps like this that live on my iPhone.  

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Matt Jones coined a very nice phrase for it at the PSFK Good Idea conference earlier this year; the phone in your pocket is like a remembering machine that whispers to you constantly ‘that’s really interesting… you should take a photo of that’.

So I do, and you probably do as well.  If you think about how much stuff (specifically digital photos but other stuff too) we create, save and keep… and then never get a chance to look through again… it’s amazing we actually remember about any of it.

We are surrounded by the digital detritus that we constantly create for ourselves, and send to each other.

Which would help explain why I can’t really remember what I was going to blog about when I took this photo yesterday…

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