technoculture203-09

I've recently retired my digital camera of five years and bought a new one. My experience in using it brings me back to one of the first lectures about Hegel's master/slave dialectic, in that digital cameras come with incredibly intelligent built-in functions nowadays. After the lecture on cyborgs, I had settled on the opinion that we are still generally in control of technology as tools to be used, not as a part of ourselves, but after this experience I'm not so certain about who is in control anymore. I point the camera towards a subject and it will automatically detect faces to focus on, adjust contrast, stabilise the image, choose the 'appropriate' ISO sensitivity, white balance, flash setting, the list goes on. I've found myself turning most of them off to gain back a sense of control and avoid becoming a lazy master, because it didn't feel like I was taking the picture anymore. Anyone could have held up the same camera and taken the exact same picture, because the camera is doing all the work.