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According to The New York Times there’s this guy, Joseph Holmes, who is an award winning photographer. One of his recent projects involved touring the streets of New York City and pointing his lens at people ferociously focused on their mobile devices. He calls his 20 photo Flickr set “Texters”. Now it isn’t up to us to judge what is or isn’t art, but let’s step back and look at this in the bigger picture. Before the mobile phone, and the iPod, and the mobile CD player, and even Sony’s original Walkman, people used to walk on the streets and interact with each other. Sure, there would be a few curious individuals trying to walk up and down a crowded avenue with their head buried in a newspaper, but for the most part you walked from point A to point B and your only source of distraction was the faces, outfits, and conversations of the sea of people you were skillfully weaving through. You focused on the world, your next task, and somewhere in the back of your mind you may have been thinking about what’s for dinner later tonight or how your favorite team is doing. What exactly have mobile devices done to us? Are we all stuck in our own individual worlds, preferring the comfort of a glowing rectangle to the warmth and infinite possible facial gestures a stranger can show us in just a split second?
Art these days is meant to cause us to have a moment of introspection, because when we’re alone, just us and the art, the only thing to focus on is our own reaction to said art. That’s a shame when you think about it, because as corny as this may sound, “art” is all around us, we’re just too busy to notice. Maybe that’s the point of “Texters” … or not.
[Via: Engadget]
About The Author
Stefan Constantinescu
Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.
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