I am in Dublin for the TNM conference and just came across this sign in a shopping mall on Henry Street. Basically, they are offering you to pay for having your profile pictures for use on online social networks taken. Well, so much for DIY culture. One would sort of think that facebookers, tweeters and people networking through LinkedIn would also be competent users of digital cameras, webcams and such. McLuhan wrote in 1964 (Understanding media: The extensions of man) that one must realize that there is no stopping the flow and the development of new electronic media, but also made the point that all such new media and their potential uses are also being held back by the fact that people’s way of appropriating these new media is shaped by their experiences with previous media.

The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who have acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be. This would seem to be a normal, and even amiable, trait ensuring a maximal degree of social continuity and permanence amidst change and innovation. But all the conservatism in the world does not afford even a token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electric media (McLuhan 1964/2001:216).

And surely, we still see a lot of people printing out websites on paper, calling on the phone to double check communications that have taken place online, choosing to read magazines on paper as well as digitally, etc. I definitely do some of these things myself sometimes. It is all natural that new media don’t replace the older ones right away. Instead, old and new media are layered and intertwined in increasingly complex ways. Loads of sociohistorical theories acknowledge that the development of culture will most likely take place in a sequence of two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back. Social media being part of a shopping mall photographer’s every day practice definitely represents two steps forward. But the idea that professionals should help users take their photos for these types of forums definitely represents one step back. At least.