Henry VIII, Hans Holbein, Facebook and Gilligan

“in a relationship”

The painting above is of Anne of Cleves, done by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1539.

Holbein had been dispatched to Germany by Henry VIII, who was contemplating marrying Anne, sight unseen.  Henry sent Holbein to paint a portrait of Anne so that he could decide if he wanted to marry her or not. The painting above is what Holbein produced. Think of it as the first Facebook page.

Based on the painting, Henry married her, but the morning after the marriage he confided to Cromwell, who had set up the marriage, “I liked her not well before but now I like her much worse”.

Well, Henry would not be the first person to be decived by a photo posted on facebook.

Paintings were pretty rare in the 16th Century.

Almost no one had one doe of themselves or their families, unless they were exceedingly rich or they were about to get married to the King of England.

In fact, most peasants probably never saw a painting in their lives, save perhaps for one that might hang in their local church – maybe.

The average person today probably sees more imagery in a half hour than most humans saw in their entire lives.

There are currently 10 billion photos on Facebook, but this is not, surprisingly, the largest cache of photos on the web.

That honor goes to ImageShack, which currently has 20 billion photos.

But Facebook is adding 850 million photos a month, and it will not be long before the gap is closed.

Between Facebook, ImageShack, PhotoBucket (7.2 billion), Flickr (3.4 billion) and a few others, there are now in excess of 50 billion photos on the web.

And we are still just at the beginning.

If you spent just one second looking at each image, it would now take you 1550 years to look at all the images on the web.

Of course, by the time you got done, there would be a lot more. In effect, we are touching on the infinite.

Compare this plethora of images to the sheer poverty of images that humans have experienced for 99.9999999% of their time on earth.

This is a very very radical transformation for us.

We are beginning to experience a world unlike anything we have ever known before.

And of course what has happened to photographs is going to happen to video as more and more people begin to create video content and upload this as well.

Yesterday, Sherwood Schwartz died.

For those who don’t know who this is, (most people), he was the creator of Gilligan’s Island.

For those who don’t know what Gilligan’s Island was, it was a TV show.

(For those who don’t know what a TV show is, it was like Hulu.com, except you had to watch what was being shown in real time and there was no way to pause or drag the image forward).

When Gilligan’s Island aired it averaged more than 18 million viewers per show.

Those were the days.

TV shows were about as common as Holbein paintings, and about as expensive to produce.

But now we are entering a world where there will be as many videos as there are photos, and there is no reason why people won’t start to make their own Gilligan’s Island. I mean, seriously, what does it take? A boat, a beach and a radio made out of coconuts.

What do youl think Henry…. Mary Ann or Ginger?