That blank sheet of paper in front of me is pretty confrontational. It challenges me to decide what to do with it. The camera challenges me to pick it up and point it at something.
True, once I’m looking through the viewfinder, I go into some sort of  “Photographer” mode. My personal identity simplifies down to a guy looking through a little square. All of the circuitry that thinks about lens choice, aperture, light angle, shadow depth all spring into action unbidden.
I even hear Vincent Versace’s voice in my ear murmuring “Own the frame . . . own the frame”.
I capture, move, capture, adjust, scroll through images on the camera’s screen, adjust, capture, move.
There’s a flow where my vision, the set of tools and my environment all meld into a seamless extension of me.
Of course writing this post wasn’t all that different. I came to the text editor with the germ of an idea and soon found myself in a flood of ideas, unaware of the keyboard, word choice or what computer OS I was using. Me integrated into a set of tools interacting with an environment. Here the environment isn’t real at all. Just ASCII strings.
Engaging in all of the complexity of a blank sheet of paper or the unstructured visual environment puts the me that sits in my head “out there”. Words and cameras have that power.
The Internet has the opposite power. Sure I’m in a flow out there when browsing, but it’s a flow that’s not much use that emerges. It’s often a seamless flow, but its not controlled by a creative process, but by a consumptive process. Looking for a stimulus “out there” that will satisfy. A new email, maybe with good news. A post or tweet I agree with, that validates my point of view. News of a long awaited OS update- maybe just rumor of a new piece of gear. Not yet? Cycle out to something else and come back again later. Later? 5 minutes then 10 minutes.
Who’s the actor here? Who’s choosing?
Time for lunch. Where does the day go?
