Rick Smolan
Rick Smolan
Rick Smolan is a former TIME, LIFE and National Geographic photographer best known as the co-creator of the "Day in the Life" book series. He is currently CEO of Against All Odds Productions, a cross-media organization which utilizes the skills of hundreds of the world's leading photographers, writers, filmmakers, designers and programmers to merge creative storytelling with state-of-the-art technology...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth5 November 1949
CountryUnited States of America
Big Data is just that - big. But, it's a term that is largely misunderstood and difficult to explain.
Americans are changing right before our eyes. They are choosing different lifestyles, families, traditions and ways of living.
A tiny apartment might hold three generations of an immigrant family.
Every time there's a new tool, whether it's Internet or cell phones or anything else, all these things can be used for good or evil. Technology is neutral; it depends on how it's used.
What amazes me is that you can have 10 different photographers in the same room, and you see 10 different rooms. You realize how much of it is the person's perspective rather than the situation itself.
Those who fear that we are losing our individualism couldn't be more wrong: Americans have never been more free to create and recreate themselves.
They're trying to put data centers in cold environments because they're actually generating so much heat now; they're using up so much electricity.
My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings.
If you travel 11 months a year - from one dangerous or isolated situation to the next - if you live in hotels, and every relationship with another human being is a two-week relationship, the only other people who have any idea what you're going through or how strung out you are are other photographers.
In 1978, 'Time' magazine sent me to do a story about children in Southeast Asia fathered by American GIs. What I saw was very upsetting, but the story they published was whitewashed.
How do you photograph a gadget in a new, and not boring, way? You have to get away from people sitting in front of a computer. You have to get a look at the digital signature.
Targeted ads, I think, are useful because I don't want to see all the crap. I'm not interested in buying a Mercedes Benz, but I am interested in buying a new MacBook Air. So if organizations like Facebook can actually make the ads more relevant to me, if they know what I am interested in, I have no problem with that.
Sergey Brin has said to me, like, 10 times now, 'Why do you bother doing books? Why don't you just put all this stuff on the Internet?' It's because 10 years from now, my book will still be sitting on someone's coffee table or in a waiting room.
You can't talk about big data without talking about things like privacy and ownership.