I felt the digg effect
Friday, May 26th, 2006
A few days ago I flew to California and as usual, I took some pictures out the plane window. I like taking these pictures as anyone who’s followed this weblog will attest to and some of them turn out pretty well: the subject matter is interesting and the photograph, even though taken through a plane window, is technically acceptable.
After arriving in LA I lazily took a look at the images I’d gotten on the trip out and some of them looked pretty good so I did a bit of work on them, thought about and wrote captions, and uploaded to flickr and then blogged them here from there. I have another photo site which I’ll announce here shortly and I upload only my best images there. A few from this set made it to that site as well, which means I thought I had some interesting images.
Note that most of my captions are descriptions of both the image and my feelings about the content of the image. I try to make the captions interesting and put some time into writing them.
Over the course of yesterday the new images got some nice comments on flickr from many of the people who usually comment on my work and from a few new ones and I felt good about the images, knowing I had some good stuff and I was looking forward to getting home and doing some printing.
Later in the day I noticed that this image: Land’s End was getting quite a bit of traffic and I had no idea why. I noticed the word “dugg” in the comment string and even though I’d gotten the digg.com RSS feed for a while (I grew tired of it) I didn’t put two and two together. Well, it seems that someone “dugg” the photo: Incredible Photo: “Land’s End”, put a post on digg.com about it, but not only that, he interpreted my caption as making an environmental statement about erosion (I was not). I don’t blame him for this, he didn’t know me or my writing style but anyone who does knows that I use visual metaphors and in fact the image does make it look like the less developed (un-farmed) land is eroding away. Or, one could look at the image and say that farmland is taking over. Who knows.
Digg is a very popular social bookmarking site that has unique tools that allow users to vote or “digg” a particular bookmark. They can also comment on the bookmark and the digg comment string for this post while not as long as some, goes off on an environmental crusade tangent because of the context in which this fellow dugg my image.
The important thing is that my little backwater flickr stream got churned (hopefully not eroded) over the course of the next few hours. That image alone got 10,000 views in the first hour, another 10,000 in the next hour and when I went to bed last night it had close to 30,000 views. This morning it has over 40,000 and on digg.com the post was dugg over 1100 times. Last night the churn affected my ability to use flickr; my space was bogged down in it. This is really something because yahoo/flickr uses some serious iron to run this photographic community.
I feel like a guy who was displaying his photographs on a card table who got overrun by a mob. My flickr mailbox is exploding, my other images have also now been churned by this crowd and the erosion story, while I did my best last night to put a stop to it keeps on going. People have now blogged the image and the caption all over the world and it’s being discussed in threads off of flickr.
All of this brings to mind Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point and a great article he wrote prior to it in The New Yorker: Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg. This image tipped although I’d be interested to know if it would have tipped had I not written a caption that used the word “erosion” in it. Gotta watch those words, they can be loaded. Or, learn to use more loaded words.
Wow, what an amazing story, and a cautionary tale about the weird but awesome power of the internet. I’m glad my photos are neither good nor popular enough to attract that kind of attention!
Andrew: Yes, it is. Blink and you miss my fame. It’s “Worholian” isn’t it (15 minutes of fame)? And, the part that interests me the most is how the caption got distorted and telephoned. Guess I need a lesson from Rove on message control, ‘eh?
Richard, what an astonishing ripple effect from your photo. I always knew you’d be famous!
Gary: trust me, it’s a blip. Here today, gone tomorrow.
Interesting story. I lack the time to read through all those digg comments, but clearly some folks misinterpreted your photo and text. I had wanted to comment on your original photo when you posted it but never came around to it. So I figure this is my second chance and I should take it. Aside from the apocalyptic beauty of the photo the reason I wanted to make a comment is because of your use of the word erosion. I gather you used it more loss metaphorically, but let’s assume for a moment it is not just metaphoric but real. In that case this is indeed erosion that you are seeing, but it is erosion at a geological time scale (millions of years) that is an inevitable natural process. Because your image was taken from such high altitude the resulting image is in a way “flattened” making the plain with escarpement look like a small step and leading people to remark (on flikr) that they do not see trees and shrubs to stop the erosion. I think that at this scale if there are trees and bushes you can not distinguish them so it seems a bit too early to conclude they are not there. Anyway, I think because of the flattening and scale effects people have been interpreting this image as a sample of human-induced erosion rapidly eating away fertile land because of mismanagement, whereas in reality this is geological scale erosion that is a natural process. All in all, it is not only a great image, but also a great example of how images can be misinterpreted and even abused when taken out of context or when people have little understanding of what they are seeing…
David: Amen on the last sentence. And, the digg effect can amplify the context issues to great effect which is what’s scary about it. What if it were something meaningful? Thanks.
I’m half expecting to see this exact same image in one of our national (UK) newspapers…
Quite often lately, I’ve spotted an interesting image on Digg or flickr and within about 10 days the same image has appeared in The Times or the Metro.
Funny how the Digg post ended up turning into an environmental discussion…
It is a good pic though. :-)
AlexF: I wouldn’t be surprised to see this image in lots of places. After it got dugg it started showing up in lots of places because I had my flickr account wide open back then. A lot of people seem to like the image although I must say, while it’s an interesting shot the quality of the actual file is terrible. Funny how that goes.
Get ready for more diggs/duggs or whatever because Photo Argus just published this as 50 awe-inspiring aerial photos.
Wow Pam, thanks for letting me know. And, they did it the right way with a link back to my flickr account. Good for them. Thanks again for the heads up Pam.
Just wanting to let you know that your photo is once again gaining popularity, but this time, it is through Tumblr, namely this post: http://exterra.tumblr.com/post/17227857898/lands-end-by-richard
Thanks Jisoo, I’ve notified the tumbler user about what he’s done and we’ll see if he takes it down. If he’d asked I’d have been happy to allow him to embed it. Thanks again for the heads up.