It’s not been a great week for selfies: first the tag #aftersexselfies went viral and we were forced to stare at hundreds of disconcertingly close-shot post-coital faces. Then Kim Kardashian was snapped trying and failing to take one with a baby elephant, and finally Prince Andrew broke palace protocol yesterday by taking the world’s least elegant group selfie at a tech event in Buckingham Palace. But that’s OK, because we’re over selfies now – we’re all taking elsies instead.
Elsies are pictures you take of other people, naturally. You know, the way people have been taking pictures for the last 180 years. Only now it’s got a special name, so it’s a thing. It’s a thing because we’re all apparently ditching our camera phones for Autographer, a camera you wear around your neck, so it can take pictures of what’s happening around you automatically throughout the day. The camera has a set of fixed algorithms it uses to decide when to take a photo – thinking about lighting levels and whether there are people in the shot.
Autographer camera doesn’t have a visual browser, so you can only view the pictures using an app on your phone or your desktop (the Android app launched this week, folks). The idea is that at the end of the day you’ll have a visual diary of what happened around you, which is quite cool in a way, as it might stop us spending hours trying to create that perfectly composed, perfectly lit, perfectly filtered image (boring), and we’re more than a little intrigued to see what sort of images we’d end up with after a pissed night out.
On the other hand, it will mean every walking moment of your day will be recorded for posterity. You’ll be lifelogging your every movement. Yes, I said lifelogging. Do you want to be the sort of person who lifeloggs?
Isn’t anyone else a little discomfited by the thought that we’ve become so obsessed with recording every minute detail of our lives with images that we can’t even be bothered to take our cameras out and press a button – let alone make a decision ourselves about what we want to capture? Have we all fallen so far down the Instagram rabbit hole that if we didn’t take a picture of it, it never happened?
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Picture: Rex
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.