Shitpics happen when an image is put through some diabolical combination of uploading, screencapping, filtering, cropping, and reuploading. They are particularly popular on Instagram.
File this under another modern thing I wasn’t aware of. One thing not covered in the article is this is really a result of 3 things
- Mobile computing
- Everyone online w/ smartphones
- Lack of tech-savvy / education (no longer needed to be a citizen of the web)
Just a quick trip down memory lane. There was a time when original stolen copyright content was rampant on the Internet. If you see a photo, hear a song or watch a video you want to save, that’s as easy as just a right-click and save to desktop. You can post / upload that content somewhere else very easily to a server you own or owned by someone else. I could find thousands of cases of my words or photos being stolen from me all over the Internet with a good example today being that I quoted The Awl for this post. That’s stealing according to some content creators.
When talking about these crappy re-posts, how are people stealing them?
- They save the image to their phone
- They screen cap the entire phone screen (carrier logo and all)
- They ‘forward’ it to a friend which is the same as copy-paste
We’re in an age of crappy web devices on still-slow (compared to hardwired) wireless Internet connections. The result is a stock photo stolen by someone just like the old days, with a watermark added and a ‘meme block of text’ and then posted to Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, etc. Once that happens, the new-age way of stealing begins and you get these JPEGs that have been compressed, saved, sent, transferred, edited, cropped hundreds of times until everything (even the text) is blurry, with weird crop ratios, etc.
Even an artist like Ludacris who hates when people steal his songs has now stolen an image used so many times that it’s hard to even know who took the photo that was altered to be a meme.
This story is not a new one though. These crappy images are the modern version of chain-letters sent from your Great-Aunt in Nebraska. You remember those? Luckily, i haven’t received one in many years but the people who used to forward those around have just moved on to image-macros.
I kind of wish we could go back to chain-letters.