Nick Paumgarten's We Are A Camera

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1. Nick Paumgarten, the writer of “We Are a Camera”, brings a few flaws of the GoPro to light. A few of these flaws are in the tedious design, but one major risks of the GoPro are the intent of what it’s commonly used for and the people using the GoPro. In the design of the GoPro Paumgarten explains, “It has no display, so you can’t see what’s in the frame.” (332) This could be annoying because the user may need some experience with the GoPro camera lens to know how broad the vision is on the device. The user could also be flustered by the editing and broadcasting software. Paumgarten explains the editing software, “As Schmidt has said, you don’t hunt shots, you capture them. (This approach requires lots of work in the cutting room, or what Surfing called ‘a time-warping pain in the edit-ass.’)” (333). Paumgarten also expresses his view towards the broadcasting software, “As for broadcasting applications, we are still in a relatively primitive stage.” (334). The design issues and software may be of annoyance to some users, but they do not outweigh the benefits of the GoPro because of these reasons: after …show more content…

The GoPro had all the factors (cultural, economic, and technological) working in its favor to success. Paumgarten explains these factors in, “We are a Camera.” One example he gives for its cultural success is, “GoPro footage is related to the selfie, in its “Here I am” (or “was”) ethos, and its wide view and variety of mounts often allow the filmmaker to include himself, or some part of himself, in the shot.” The GoPro also expressed a new way of showing off one’s life outside of a selfie, as Paumgarten further explains, “But because it primarily points outward it’s a record of what an experience looks like, rather than what the person who had the experience looked like when he stopped afterward and arranged his features into his pretested photo face.” (333-334) The user has their own little attention grabber for social media or any other form of

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