You just can’t stop progress

ONCE upon a time, when you spoke about photography it was assumed you were referring to Kodak. That was the film you put into your camera as a “happy snapper”, those were the eponymous “Kodak Moments” that your mom kept in her brag book or in yellowing albums in the chest of drawers.

Hell, even the film the movies were shot on that you watched in the bioscope was “Eastman Kodak”.

It’s difficult to remember how ubiquitous, how all-conquering the brand was if you’re not 50 or over because today the only reminder are those funny little red and yellow machines in malls that you approach to insert your memory card to print out hard copies of your holiday happy snaps.

How did it come to this? Blame the digital revolution over probably the last 20 years. Everyone dropped film faster than hot cakes.

It was tricky to use, expensive to develop film and print pictures, and a bugger to keep the negatives (remember them?) properly filed if you wanted reprints. Digital cameras, on the other hand, just got cheaper as the years went by.

Today everyone’s got one – on their cellphones. It’s so easy that everyone’s at it; in fact there’s nothing sacred any more whether it’s celebs in the gym or national keypoints like Nkandla.

We’ve even developed a brand new phenomenon – the selfie, where you can insert yourself, depending on the scale of your vanity, into everything from a live performance to your sex life. You don’t have to print it out for posterity, you can just upload to one of a quiver of social media apps and you’ll live on for eternity in cyberspace.

And yet, people still print pictures – at a dinky little Kodak kiosk.

Here’s the rub, it was Kodak which invented the first digital camera – in 1975, about 20 years before the digital revolution. They believed they weren’t in the storytelling business but the film-making business, so they kept the patent under wraps… until one day it was too late.

The same has happened to the media. Today everybody is a citizen journalist. You can upload movies to YouTube or tweet stills of police brutality. The rest of us “proper journalists” have to adapt or go extinct. There’s still a role for us, probably greater than ever before as professional truth tellers and mirrors to society, but technology has democratised the market place; readers or consumers vote with their fingers, flitting to other sites to get their news or “content”.

You can, like King Canute, stick your feet into the sand and command the waves to desist, but my money’s on the sea, you’ll take a bath – much like the angry meter taxi drivers outside the Gautrain Sandton train station this week.

I didn’t even know anyone used metered taxis up here any more.

The ones I’ve ever used have been old and smelly, driven by cantankerous old sods and eye-wateringly expensive.

Uber, though, has changed all that.

Some people I know don’t even have cars; they use Uber to get to appointments and it’s an absolute boon for going out on the weekend, especially if you have a couple of drinks. Thanks to an app, more people are using taxis than ever before, not fewer. It’s seamless, it’s clean, it’s cheap. Now the Jurassic part of the industry has looked up and realised the jungle’s moved on. And intimidating potential passengers – even if that is the time-honoured South African solution – won’t work here.

It’s not too late to catch up, but it will be on Uber’s terms, not theirs.

Welcome to the brave new world.