Touching up Photos: what are pictures for?

For the second time in as many weeks I've seen some nice photos only to realize after the fact that they had been severely touched up. Keep in mind that these photos were meant as keepsakes, records of events from the past, so that they wouldn't be forgotten. When you touch up a photo which is supposed to be an easy way to keep an account of the past, what are you doing? Revising history? Seeing the past through rose-colored glasses? Seems innocent, but how innocent is it really?

Years later, your children may come across touched up pictures of you from your youth. Let's say they made you look a few pounds slimmer in the photos. Your children may aspire to look like you, or at least that fictitious you, and eventually may accomplish the goal. So, basically you've set in motion a chain of events where your children might work to keep a better figure than you did, in a way you've done them a favor, right? Lets say that your daughter, now twenty and looking exactly like fictitious you, happens upon that outfit you were wearing in that picture, and tries it on. Suddenly the outfit is a couple of sizes bigger than it should be and she's swimming in it, that's a weird bit of cognitive dissonance. Right there your child might lose respect for you, for deceiving them all these years. What if she tortured herself to be as slim as you were in this picture? What if she earned it through a lot of sweat and tears? Yeah, she may be healthier or better off, but she just lost faith in everything you ever taught her. Maybe all of it, all of the life lessons, the morals were just touched-up stories? Is it worth it?

What it comes down to is this: When you can remix history to conform to your ideal rather than the reality of the past, you end up with a fairytale that sounds good at first but can have both subtle and serious repercussions down the road.

Yeah, when we're talking about creating art or marketing, then photo touch-ups make sense, but the same examples still apply. Look what we're doing to ourselves by exposing ourselves to non-stop fairytale touch-ups everywhere we look.

Another crazy Apple Prediction: Channels

I thought about this a while back and never posted it (nice to know I censor myself sometimes?) because I didn't think it ultimately very likely, but I'll put it out there because it isn't unthinkable, and if it were to happen, I could point to this post and say: "See? I thought this might happen" -- more or less exactly what I did with Antennagate which I all but predicted a month before the iPhone4 release. 

One of the reasons Apple may be holding back on subscription services is that they may want to make a major play for bundling various media into channels: Rather than subscribing to the NYTimes, you could subscribe to "US leading newspapers" and get the NYTimes, WSJ, Washington Times, for one low price, kind of like an album, or in cable television lingo, a channel.

What's cool is that with Apple's iTunes store being multi-media, the channels could include books, podcasts, apps, music, movies and tv in a single channel. 

They could have a Parenthood channel, a SciFi channel, a Self-Help (Lifehacker?) channel, a Cooking channel, a Gaming channel, a Womens channel, a MAKE channel, etc etc.

I don't know that they could ever quite pull it off, or whether they could pull it off in a way that would be advantageous to them, but think of the customer lock-in that could achieve. Sure Android might have all the same popular apps, but you can't purchase them for one low price along with related TV/Music/books/podcasts/magazine/newspapers etc.

Steve Jobs could very well usurp Howard Stern for the title King of All Media.