On Stealing & Other Douchebaggery

I feel like this is a topic that I specifically need to address, given that several of my friends have recently been subjected to severe bouts of internet plagiarism. And when I say severe, I mean that entire blogs, collections of poetry, and photo galleries have been ripped, copied, and passed off as another individual's work.

This is very, very uncool.

Let me make a few things clear:

1. I believe in a Creative Commons share and share alike approach to all intellectual property on the internet. If you want to source my writing or my photographs with attribution, that's perfectly fine by me. In fact, my narcissistic self gets a kick out of seeing my number of Google hits increase (yeah, yeah, I egosurf -- sue me), so attribute away.

2. I strongly feel that anyone who doesn't want any of his or her images or ideas reproduced at all should just keep all such work offline, because honestly -- you're asking a little much of several billion people not to pass around your nonsense if you're sticking it up on the aptly-named World Wide Web.

3. To that end, I don't go to any great lengths to protect my images. They're up on the internet, they're easily saved (can anyone explain to me why people try so hard to prevent others from right click + saving images when there's this handy little tool called a screenshot?!), and they'd be, in theory, very easy to steal.

4. But. If I ever, EVER catch anyone trying to plagiarize my work, the shit will hit the proverbial fan. Even worse -- and this actually happened to someone I know recently -- try to sell my work, and I will come after you with a baseball bat.

So, you know. Don't say I didn't give you fair warning.

A Few Numbers

Out of morbid curiosity, I spent a few minutes this morning going through my external hard drive and browsing my photo folders.

On May 13, 2006, I bought a Canon 30D digital SLR.

Since then, I've taken exactly 74,441 photos.

This means several things -- none of which are terribly important, but some of which are fairly worrisome.

If 328 days = 74,441 photos,
Then 1 day = 227 photos,
And 1 hour = 9.4 photos,
So every 6.35 minutes I take a photo.

In and of itself, that bit of information isn't terribly concerning; I think everyone's become used to me lugging my camera wherever I go. But let's stop to consider that, as much as I'd like to, I can't actually be awake and with my camera 24/7. Assuming that I spend roughly a quarter of my life sleeping (a generous estimate, but we'll stick with it):

Then if 1 day = 227 photos,
And if I am awake for 18 hours a day,
1 hour = 12.6 photos,
So every 4.76 minutes I take a photo.

Getting stranger, but still manageable. But then we need to take into account that I actually have classes and jobs that probably would be less than thrilled with my constant shutterbugging. So 18 hours of class a week + 12 hours of work a week = another 4.3 hours missing from every day. Thus:

If 1 day = 227 photos,
And if I am awake and not at work or in class for 13.7 hours a day,
1 hour = 16.6 photos,
So every 3.61 minutes I take a photo.

But 13.7 hours a day is still a lot of free time (and I'm pretty positive I'm not just walking around with a camera that much on a daily basis). Let's say that I spend a total of 1.5 hours every day eating, another 3 hours a day at the Spectator office, and an hour a day working in the architecture studio. Then,

If 1 day = 227 photos,
And if I am awake and not working or eating for 8.2 hours a day,
1 hour = 27.7 photos,
So every 2.16 minutes I take a photo.

YIKES.

Three Things I Would Do, In No Particular Order of Importance, Were I Gutsier & Cooler:

1. Pierce my eyebrow.

2. Get a highly stylized vaguely art deco tattoo of a swan/crane -- something like this.

3. Chop off most of my hair and dye the remains bright red.

Like I said -- if I were cooler.

The One Train Turns 1

Time for a redesign, possibly involving this image? We shall see...

On Photojournalism

A friend/co-Spectator photog remarked to me once that working in a newsroom inverts your moral compass. I think that may be a slightly extreme assessment -- but after working for (what feels like) so long in the office of a daily, almost-professional paper, I can't help but acknowledge that we newsfolk have a bit of an unhealthy desire for doom and gloom and all things disastrous.

Perhaps it's just part of the job; after all, human nature is such that happy, heart-warming, & cuddly stories are of far less interest than that Harvard grad who cut up his ex-wife into little bits and stored her julienned remains in his closet until the neighbors complained of a strange stench. Or maybe it's because people who go all-out, batshit insane are much more extreme than their benevolent, generous, kind counterparts (though admittedly Wesley Autrey could spearhead a pretty decent counter-argument).

But for whatever reason, journalists never wish for Wesley Autreys on slow news days. We wish for homicides and fires and scandals (on a more reasonable college scale, we wish for epic ideological battles between extreme leftists and nutcase speakers or taser attacks in the campus library). I can't count how many times I've heard an editor or reporter complain that there haven't been enough murders recently, or that someone should consider setting fire to Columbia's iconic administrative building, Low Library, in time to make deadline.

Does that make us bad people? Almost certainly not, but it certainly doesn't make me feel all warm and fuzzy about my internal ethics system. It doesn't really matter that we haven't actually torched President Bollinger's office to the ground -- the point is, we've weighed the negatives against the number of website hits we'd get the next day.

When I flipped through this year's World Press Photo winners, part of me was slightly sickened every time I realized that those photographers were actively and continually making a choice to stay uninvolved -- even when their assistance might have saved a life. Maintaining neutrality at the cost of empathy is simultaneously a noble and horrific choice to make.

In two weeks, I'm going to New Orleans along with my professor and classmates from a GSAPP class on rebuilding the city, and I'm not sure what I'm going to find or how I'm going to react. Clearly, New Orleans is not Israel or Afghanistan or the Sudan, but still ... I hope I can find a balance.

Nicole Miller Show

See if you can spot the amateur at the front of the pit wearing red. That was last Friday -- I wore black to every single show for the rest of the week.

(Photo courtesy Spectator photographer Diana Wong.)

To the Tune of "It's a Small World":

Robin: My parents were at a bakery when my dad realized the girl behind the counter was Stranger 008.
Robin: :)
Me: ...

Decisions, Decisions

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Flickr Tagging Pays Off

Woo! Gothamist ran one of my photos!

The Nation

Hey, The Nation is running one of my photos!