Consider the new Kodak Photo Voice service. As described in a press release:
KODAK Photo Voice is a brand new way to relive memories, empowering two people to simultaneously view a customized slideshow, and to reminisce and react to each picture. Imagine if Grandma could see pictures from her grandson’s first day at school while he narrates every moment of the experience over Skype. Perhaps an old roommate could share detailed photos and recount stories of his new life in London, as his friend back home in California reacts to each picture.
Much of the value in communication comes from sense of presence. The human body naturally combines images and sound in making sense of presence. An external combination of images and sound reduces the bodily cost of making sense of presence.
Unfortunately, I don’t think Kodak Photo Voice is a auspicious type of service for the production of presence. It supports low-production-value, pre-produced visual content (a narrative skeleton) that one person places at the other’s attention. Offering to share one’s photographs of a vacation, relatives, a holiday gathering, etc., is a delicate relational move. Being subject to another’s narrative of their photographs can make one feel virtually non-existent. It can be a tedious, numbing experience where you feel that you are being simply controlled by the obligations of friendship or kin relation.
An auspicious “show-and-tell” communication device would put immediately into the stream of communication images that any participant spontaneously generates while moving about the world and interacting with things of the world. “Camera phones” don’t do this. Neither does Kodak Photo Voice.
Update: For more business insight, see Carnival of Business #4 at Techie Day.
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