The geniuses over at The Onion had a video a while back about a fire breaking out at a dorm party; during their investigation, the police are quickly able to establish the cause of the fire by examining the thousands of photos uploaded to Facebook by the party-goers, photos that have recorded every second of the party from every conceivable angle, including the cigarette that set the room ablaze. The mystery is solved, and all thanks to our “seemingly boundless narcissism.”
It’s funny because it’s true. Remember that person with 1500 Facebook friends I mentioned in a recent blog? I just looked and can confirm that they’ve uploaded over 5,000 photos of themselves to Facebook. I didn’t even think the Eiffel Tower had been photographed that many times, but there you go. There’s no doubt that we are taking a lot of pictures these days. How many you say? Jonathan Good over at 1000Memories.com has an interesting blog post on this very topic, complete with some fancy mathimicatin’ calculatorians and estimatings. Some fun facts:
-Every two minutes there are more photos taken than were taken during the whole of the 19th century. (Also: way more than were taken in the 5th century AD)
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-Humanity has taken somewhere around 3.5 trillion photos since the advent of photography
-“Ten percent of all the photos we have were taken in the past 12 months.”
-70 billion photos will be uploaded to Facebook this year
Needless to say, Facebook is sizing up to be the largest photo library in history:
While it certainly helps that just about everything has a built-in camera these days (phones, laptops, MP3 players), the explosion in amateur photography can’t be entirely due to the ubiquity of digital. As much as social networking makes it easier for us to share, I think it’s clear that it also increases our desire to share; we see our friends uploading pictures and tweeting and we feel we have to join-in to become part of the fun. Not uploading 5,000 pictures to Facebook is becoming asocial.
However many billion photos we upload this year, Spokeo’s Reverse Email Search is easily the best way to sort thru them all. Search somebody’s email address and our state-of-the-art People Search technology will comb through the immense pile of online pictures in a matter of seconds. Try it now!