I grew up in the internet age and I am still amazed how services like YouTube can offer us thousands of hours of high quality, high definition video on demand over an internet line when only a few years ago loading a single jpeg image on a website could take an age to display.
Unfortunately, despite the rampant advancement in technology, our ability to use it correctly hasn’t progressed quite as quickly.
Take phones for example; I think we can safely say that cameras on phones have been a staple since at least the mid 2000’s, giving us well over ten years to learn the principles of framing a photo or video, yet we’re still blighted by awful vertically filmed video from awful people who usually still aren’t able to fulfil the simple requirement of actually pointing the thing at the thing they want to film.
Every modern phone should have a function that uses the gyro in the camera to detect when some arse-flap is holding their phone in the wrong orientation and prompt them with a warning that filming will not continue until they hold the phone the correct way, or give them a quick jolt of electricity, or simply explode like a Samsung phone does.
The hands-free function on mobile phones is also a feature that seems to confuse many phone users who insist on using it on busy streets and in supermarkets to talk VERY LOUDLY to the person on the other end, whilst STILL HOLDING THE PHONE IN THEIR HAND, thus rendering the advantages of the hands free functions utterly void.
A feature could be implemented that could detect the phone still being held and insist the user put the phone to their ear like a normal person, though I would submit that the only logical recourse would be to feed the user their own phone, in one whole piece, very slowly, like a penguin swallowing a fish.
One kind of user that still remains stubbornly abundant, despite some very high-profile campaigns to rid the world of this scourge, is the iPad photographer.
It truly baffles me how anyone in this day and age can remember to leave the house with their car keys, wallet and a cumbersome iPad, but somehow forget their mobile phone. Who are you? Where did you come from?
Why are you blocking my view with your massive tablet in a pink case? Your photos will be awful and everyone will hate you, so nobody wins.