According to this Washington Post article the print business is dropping at an alarming rate.
According to estimates from IDC, 42 billion photos will be printed worldwide, both commercially and personally, in 2013. That’s a third fewer than the 63 billion printed in 2008. Meanwhile about 124 billion photos are on pace to be shared through social networks that year. – Washington Post
If you’re like me you’re now looking at/seeing/enjoying more of your friends photos than ever before. Let’s face it…
Nearly Everyone has some type of camera on them at all times and even your Mom has a Facebook account at this point. (ok maybe not every Mom but mine does)
Obviously people will still need the odd print here and there to hang in a frame on the wall but could social network photo galleries be the death of things such as the traditional “photo album”?
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3 Comments at "Social Networking vs The Printed Image"
I gave up trying to predict how things will end up after reading many others over the years incorrectly predict how things would end up. Trends are misleading. The future isn’t linear.
Just as a small example, consider all the sci-fi movies from the 40′s and 50′s that imagined spaceships filled with vacuum tube equipment – because nobody foresaw the invention of transistors.
So predict away how social networking sites will be the domain of images… at least until the invention of something you haven’t ever dreamed of.
I never really thought about that before, but I think it definitely already has. So many people ask for cd packages for weddings now rather than actual prints. Everything is going digital. It’s more convenient, it’s cheaper, it’s the way of the future. And that’s a sad truth.
If we’re thinking up ways of displaying images that haven’t been invented yet… I’ve always like Neal Stephenson’s vision of the future (“Snowcrash”, “The Diamond Age”) with nanotechnology embedded in “paper”, giving you living “prints”. Sorta like a really REALLY thin iPad. As long as we stay flexible with upcoming tech, we’ll still have a very viable business… or at least that’s how I’m going to think.
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