The Faces of my Career(s)

A friend of mine posted on Facebook recently, about me that "Some people have hobbies, you just go master several careers." and of course he was being funny and flattering and was really just referring to my tendency to research and superficially absorb many different things.   The operative term being, superficially.

I suppose that's the great thing about information dissemination in the age of Google.   In times of past, we'd have to study as an apprentice under a tradesmen for years to get the meat-and-potatoes of a particular trade. Even Da Vinci called someone Maestro, early on.  Now, enthusiastic self-published youtubers are happy to show you their skills.

That isn't to say it is reasonable to expect a person to gain a full mastery of a topic via 'googling it' but certainly it seems to be the way to overcome roadblocks.

In my programming career, I've used search engines plenty to solve errors, which are usually not errors in programming syntax or algorithms but challenges in the programming environment or frameworks.   Visual Studio Wonkiness, Apple xCode unexpected behaviors, etc. I know plenty of highly talented and skilled developers that use Google, Bing, StackExchange, GitHub and others to build nearly all of their code.   I think that pattern of find, copy-and-paste code will one day soon be replicated via a clever code-generating Neural Network.

For every case of the good-spirited, brilliant-minded problem solver helping solve others problems or taking the time to post solutions to common problems, there seem to be 4 or 5 other internet-forum-trolls who are just angry about something, contributing only snarkiness.   These were the mean kids in your kindergarden class that snickered out loud as you raised your hand to ask teacher a question.

Then, in photography there is this amazing wealth of information, much of it for free or cheap to teach you about anything you'd want to know about cameras, technique, software, publishing, printing, editing, etc.    It is the reason why there is such a flood of amazing photography.  Almost  everyone has access to the Ansel Adams equivalents of our time through social media, from which to study and learn technique.

Between the incredible pace of technology growth and understanding and the accessibility of the arts to everyday people like myself, I feel we are truly amidst another renaissance of sorts.

That is, of course assuming that the internet meanies don't squash innovation and expression with cynicism and wrong-minded comments and posts.