Digital photography will eat itself!

According to data from IDC published in ZDnet's blog, almost 30 million digital cameras were sold in the US alone in 2006. Future-Phobia confidently predicts that this massive market penetration of digital cameras will eventually result in a similar effect to the "pop will eat itself" and "net advertising will eat itself" effects and an uneasy equilibrium will soon be reached, if indeed there is not a major downturn in digital camera sales.

The theory is straightforward: as more and more people buy digital cameras, and upload digital photographs onto the net, slowly but surely everything and everyone in the world will have been photographed at some point. Thus at some point it will become superfluous to take pictures, say like I did last weekend in the mountains in Serbia, because there are already so many photos, even of these relatively unknown mountains, that there is no point in photographing them, I might just as well have downloaded them from the web. In fact, there is not much point even in downloading them, just save a link somewhere so you can see where you were.

Imagine the situation with a popular spot, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris! Think how many photos there are on the net of that scene! What is the point of photographing that again!?

No, a time is soon to be upon us, when everything worth photographing will have been photographed, and the bottom will fall out of the vastly overinflated market for digital cameras!

But I must be off, I think there is a small corner of my balcony that I had clean forgotten to photograph...