One site I track regularly is The Big Picture. These series of photos from Russia that pre-date the First World War and the Russian revolution are just astonishing.

Somehow colour adds an element of 'time travel' with the imagination.

Info from The Big Picture Site about the photos:

"With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948."

This Guardian article referenced the report released the other day about how Brits spend nearly 50% of their waking lives consuming media.

The article is based around the new book by Nicholas Carr, 'The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember'.

Carr wrote the article 'Is google making us stupid?' that I discussed back in 2008, with links the a Mars Hill discussion about that work.

The Guardian highlights this qoute from Carr's new book:

"If, knowing what we know today about the brain's plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the internet" and "We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls"

To engage with social media without thought for what it does to us is to do so at our peril. This work highlights how we are literally 'shaped' at a neurological level by the patterns of our media consumption.