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Invention

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The next big thing in digital imaging technology - it's a bit like looking for Jack the Ripper. The reason they never found him is he did not exist. He was promulgated by the popular press to sell more papers.

These days I tend to stay away from the internet based pundit, blog, vlog, rumour, forum, influencer, reviewer - call them what you will - websites, all looking to predict the next big thing in digital photography, as they need to keep this idea alive, why? They are all vying for clicks, trying to grab your attention, because they share a common agenda - there's substantial money in it for all of them.

 

The big secret though is the next big thing actually does not exist. Technological development has plateaued. What we are seeing today is either existing tech repackaged and re-sold in the guise of  'new' models or small incremental developments of little practical real world value but with big change prices attached to them. The days of big step change revolutionary stuff has ground to halt.

 

Ah now, back to our 'friend' Jack. According to former Bedfordshire murder squad detective Trevor Marriot who has conducted an 11-year cold case review of the Ripper killings, the legend of “Jack” came to be after a "drunken" journalist wrote a forged letter to Scotland Yard in order to secure himself a scoop, “The reality is there was just a series of unsolved murders and they would have sunk into oblivion many years ago, but for a reporter called Thomas Bulling.”  

 

Marriot also makes the case that, "Police got a letter that Bulling had written about the murders which he signed Jack the Ripper. It has kept this mystery alive for 125 years. You have to ask yourself if Jack is a myth? There just isn't a Jack the Ripper as such."

 

As you can see, not just the media at the time made money out of this story, but it is alive and well to this day and has been and continues to be a lucrative source of revenue. Things haven't changed much. Click bait, headlines, scoops, keeping the story alive, running the agenda - protecting the revenue stream. All that has changed is the delivery technology, substituting the web for the newspaper. 

 

As for the big new thing in digital photography and Jack the Ripper story, what do they have in  common? Neither of them exist, they're just money spinning journalistic inventions designed to draw us in and keep us consuming.

 

But the the real moral of all this is to keep away from news streams, whatever their delivery platform, they all have an agenda without exception which is ultimately to make money, however cleverly disguised, and they will all do your head in with their machinations as they strive to do so.

✧ Jokul Frosti ✧

A space containing the thoughts, experiences, photos and collected curiosities of a walkabout photographer with a snapshot style.