I have read your posts on the concreteness of a negative versus the virtuality of a software image before, and find them compelling to an extent. However, between the first and second paragraphs of the quoted excerpt above there is a leap in the logic that creates a non-sequitur.
See here: Because the image is being simulated via software versus actually created on silver halide crystals.... ergo, people don't care what the image is that is actually hitting the sensor, so screw 'em, the sheeple.
Yes, most people crowded around the tiger cage at the zoo are perfectly content with a bunch of photons to remind them that yes, they were in fact standing in front of the tiger cage at the zoo. They did it with box Brownies, Instamatics, Discs, and now they do it with iPhones.
Other people would like to make an image of the tiger, one that is in their mind's eye, and that requires manipulating the photons before they hit the imaging surface, no matter what that surface might be. And to do that, at least with current technology, one must be able to manipulate the lens. Thus far, phone cameras don't do that.
[Fair warning, this isn't a dozen-word drive-by post...]
I think maybe one of us was transmitting in AM, while the other was receiving in FM? And the fault here is likely mine for transmitting incorrectly.
I was responding to your request to
"elucidate" further the proposition that
"Digital photographic technology has rendered obsolete the very meaning of purpose-built cameras." By that I meant the production of a photographic image today no longer requires a traditional, purpose-built camera. Not that the quality of the image produced by either technology was inherently inferior in any way to the other. No
"sheeple" were posited.
Back in the day, in order to make a photograph one required a real camera designed for that express purpose. It was, by design, a one-trick pony. You held it in your hands to use it. When the photographic transaction was concluded—the picture of the subject was realized—the camera was put away, as it had no other useful purpose to serve. No longer is that the case.
Now one can use a simulated abstraction of a camera, the critical path functionality of which is now housed within a handful of computer chips and the behaviors of which are now simulated by abstract computer software, which may be housed in anything. Google Glass. You laptop personal computer. Or your telephone.
IT professionals are familiar with the concept of virtual machines (VMs). Those are full and complete simulations on computers of other computers. I work from home and I'm currently connected right now over an Internet VPN circuit to two of them. They are test machines I am using to check some software modifications I've made to a company product. One is a WinXP system. The other a Win8.1 system.
They look like real computers on my displays, they act like real computers when I type or click, they run my software modifications correctly like real computers (knock on wood). But they ain't real computers. They are elaborate abstractions housed on a few host computer (memory) chips that give me all of the essential behaviors of real computers, but without all of the unnecessary messiness and liabilities of real computers.
Thus in principle is it also with software simulations of cameras. The essential behavior of creating images is preserved in the camera abstraction. But the physical camera is now obsolete, in the sense it is no longer required to complete the transaction.
Further, the abstracting chips and software could just as easily be used to simulate a purpose-built magnetic compass (GPS), or a purpose-built rotary desk telephone, or a purpose-built reel-to-reel audio tape recorder, or a purpose-built 8mm movie camera. Or all of the above, all of which a modern smartphone already does simulate.
It's been a fascinating evolutionary progression. With the advent of simulated cameras, I'm now beginning to see three distinct levels of photographic abstractions becoming dominant, and replacing their real-world counterparts.
The first level is the original photographic abstraction, present since the Niépce bitumin-on-pewter in 1827, that is created when a three-dimensional real-world scene is reduced by one dimension and rendered onto a physical two-dimensional recording medium. The so-called physical negative. (Or physical positives in the case of daguerreotypes and Polaroids.)
The second level is the abstraction of the physical photographic negative/positive into a simulated negative/positive. The so-called "raw file" abstraction. Chemical emulsion has been replaced by mathematical algorithms and pure logic that is designed to simulate the behaviors of those emulsions.
And now the third level of abstraction wherein the rendering implement itself, the physical camera, has been replaced by software abstractions where all of the essential camera behaviors required to produce an image have also become simulated in software (except the lens) and inserted into a miniaturized handheld computing device. In this case the so-called smartphone.
That device can simulate (and thus replace) a telephone, a compass, a tape recorder, a movie camera, and many other physical things. All these simulations happen using the exact same generic physical computer chips, only varying the software algorithms loaded into them for each different simulation.
I recall an ancient episode of the original
Star Trek. The usual suspects beamed down to the planet in question. There they discovered two civilizations from two planets that were in a perpetual state of war. Over time the physical mechanisms used to fight the war had gradually evolved and been replaced by computerized software abstractions of those mechanisms.
Captain Kirk was aghast to find out that they had just come under silent virtual attack, and that such battles in the war were now fought entirely in abstracted form between the respective computer systems of the two planets. Virtual attacks were launched, virtual weapons were discharged, virtual casualties were suffered and tallied, but all only within the algorithmic confines of the memory chips within the two planetary computer systems.
When the battle had concluded, the landing party was informed that the computers had determined that they had indeed all been virtually killed, and that they must immediately report to a casualty station to be, umm... voluntarily discharged. Sort of like Edward G. Robinson in
Soylent Green.
Needless to say, Captain Kirk said no freakin' way. Spock wasn't too fond of the idea either, but did see the logic in such a war-fighting arrangement.
The logic being that
all of the essential behaviors of war had been abstracted out and simulated in software, thus doing away with the inconvenient messiness of physical war itself. And the implementation of that logic was the social compact that, when identified as having been virtually killed, your duty was to immediately obey the computer's determination without question and simply report.
Thus, absent the messiness of pain and suffering and destruction, and driven by a population seeking predictability and tidiness and convenience, the war itself became an emotionless exercise that never had any real reason to end...
Not unlike the use of modern day digital photographic technologies, don't you think?
Ken