As Technology Evolves

Sometimes it's hard to realize how fast technology moves, yes, even for programming freaks like me. Truth is that probably I have fewer technological needs than others. First, I don't give a shit about facebook or about locating my (real) friends on a map in real time (and much less about being located by them). I don't need to publicize that I've just taken a pee or eaten an orange (like other people seem to desperately need), I've never liked IM programs, I consider them deeply intrusive and only use them at work, for normal life email seems much more gentle and appropriate to me. So, I don't pay for a data connection in my smartphone, I've got internet at home, at work and at almost any cafe in Xixón where I occasionally hang out. For me, a data connection in my phone would only be useful when abroad, but abroad you can't use it because of its exorbitant price (hopefully almost any cheap hostel today has free WiFi :-)

I'm a rather organized, methodical person when it comes to travelling (shame this does not apply to other aspects of my life), so apart from doing tons of previous "research" about the history and social issues of any place I plan to go, I ever take with me tons of maps, wikipedia articles and so on saved in my (cheap) smartphone and tablet. I've had one kind or another of smartphone since September 2007 (at that time we called it PDA + Phone + GPS), and believe it or not, it was not until this month that I've really needed to use my current device's GPS (I got a bit lost in Dresden when trying to reach my hostel from the Neustadt Bahnhof, allegedly a 5 minutes walk, but when you start your path right on the contrary direction because your "biological compass" tends to confuse north and south... the route can turn more complex...) My GPS helped me cause I had an offline google map of Dresden (offline google maps has been for me one of the breakthroughs in the last year, though for most people it has gone mainly unnoticed).

Well, what's prompted me to write this post is another technological advance that has been around for some time but I'd never used so far, Google Search by Image. Months ago I tried to find a harsh, moving image that I profoundly conveys the desolation brought by war. I'd seen it many times before, but I didn't know the author, I didn't have any copy of it (save for a "brain copy"), and for some reason I mistakenly thought it was related to the Crimean War (which was not possible cause at that time photography was at its early stage). So, all my attempts to locate the picture were to no avail. The other day, just by chance, I came across a blog that was using the image as header, but it had no extra information about it. Today, after providing the url for that picture to the Search by Image functionality, Google came out with this.

So this extraordinary picture is called (quite appropriately) "Grief" and was taken by Dmitri Baltermants. I was not that confused, cause the pic was taken in Crimea, but not during the Crimean War, but during the WWII (shit, there are places that have been devastated by war again and again). This page makes for a very interesting reading.

The photo depicts a 1942 Nazi massacre in the Crimean village of Kerch. Village women searched for the bodies of their loved ones. The contrast between the oversaturated sky above and the bodies haphazardly strewn in the foreground underlines the poignancy of the moment, but for the same reason, the photo was censored in the Soviet Union where authorities only published the photos that could help boost morale; ‘Grief’ reflected nothing but harsh tragedies of war, and it wasn’t seen by the general public until the 1960s.