In Germany there is a big debate about the alleged plagiarism of the popular Defense Secretary, who copied freely from other sources to fill the pages of his dissertation. He has now temporarily refrained form using his academic title. (by the way: I have an academic title too, but do not use it as that area of expertise has no relevance for what I am writing about the world of photography and technique). Plagiarism is common in the internet world and has to be: if one needs a refresh of the site of blog every day, one has to copy the work of others, because you cannot have the time and inspiration to do original research and thinking..
Nextopia is a book written by Micael Dahlén from Stockholms School of Economics. He has coined the term ‘expectation society’ to characterize modern society. We are completely focused on whet is coming, what lies in the future and we lose every interest in a product or service as soon as we have it. Keep all options open, engage in as many relations as you can, but do not commit yourself to anything: you might exclude other availabilities that are about to emerge. famous people are not persons who have shown any accomplishments, but people who have talent that they might do something important in the near future. President Obama is the best example: he won the vote by claiming that he could do everything, but had not really anything to prove it. But voters believed his mantra of ‘yes we can’. Now in office he shows that he can do only a few things that most other people could have done too.

Products by Apple are a hype as long as they are not available and when they are on the market, they are sold out in a month and everybody starts screaming for the next upgrade or a new product. We expect every newer product to be better than the previous one. “Better” is an elusive concept, but in marketing terminology more features is always better. In the past the ravages of time decided if a product was good (you tested a camera after two years of use!), now it is the satisfaction score on internet that determines if a product is worthwhile. Tomorrow is better, today is old hat.
This is the way it is and will be for a long time to come. get used to it. We evolve into a society where hardware will be less important and software will be everything. That might help evade the worldwide pollution: buy a hardware product and regularly modernize it with better software.

The rumor sites excel in this domain: every day you will read that there are rumors of new and updated products, always assuming that the thing you own or have in your hands is worthless when the new Thing comes on the market. Who wants to be seen with a Leica M9 when there are rumors that an M10 is in the pipeline. The original idea of the Leica Upgrade Program (to hold on to your camera body with software upgrades to add meaningful features) was quite good. But it is a bad idea for the manufacturing side of the company: you cannot (yet) get all profit from selling software upgrades.

I am still of the opinion that less is better: we have everything we can handle or can use. We live in a mature and even saturated society. Is there anybody who can truly claim that the current cameras and printers and software are not able to produce a masterpiece picture that is technically and creatively breathtaking? The Leica M9 can deliver much better imagery than any previous Leica camera. (The film loading cameras have more theoretical potential, but are hampered by the darkroom operations).
The modern software (my current favorite is Capture One, version 6) and printers (Epson 3800) can produce results that the old masters would have thought impossible. Are we happy? Not really I am afraid. We expect a doubling of the amount of pixels in the next generation, not because we need them but because we want to compete with the Canons and Nikons of this world.

Satisfaction and creativity are related to the mind, not to material products. Perhaps we should forget for some time the next-ism approach and focus on what is going in in our brain.