Rick Smolan (born November 5, 1949[1]) is a former Time, Life, and National Geographic photographer best known as the co-creator of the Day in the Life book series. He is currently CEO of Against All Odds Productions,[2] a cross-media organization.[3]
YouTube Encyclopedic
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Rick Smolan: Can Big Data Change Who You Are?
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Rick Smolan: Using Psychic Apps to Improve Your Health
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100 Photographers, 24 Hours, 1 Mission
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The Human Face of Big Data: Rick Smolan
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TEDxBerkeley - Rick Smolan - 04/03/10
Transcription
Last year at the World Economic Forum there were a number of people talking about the fact that they see big data as a new asset class. I think Zack Bogue, who is Marissa Mayer’s husband, was telling us about this also. When we were doing research, he and Marissa were both incredibly helpful to us in kind of conceptualizing the whole project. There’s a story in the book about a gentleman who has a pacemaker; it’s a wireless pacemaker, so throughout his day the data from his heart is transmitted to his doctor, and he actually spent time looking at his exercise, his nutrition, his alcohol consumption, and he wanted to find out whether there is some correlation between his other activities and when his pacemaker kicked in. So he called the manufacture saying, “Could I get a copy of the last six months of my heart data?” and they said, "Sorry, sir, this is proprietary." He said, “Wait a second. This is my heart. You have been collecting information about my heart; I want a copy of the information.” They have refused to give it to him. What I love about the story is it kind of makes you think, well, wait a second, why is it that my browser history is being sold to the highest advertiser, there’s credit card companies selling the data about what I’m consuming, everybody’s trading in all the data that I’m creating, and here’s a guy who - someone is actually recording his heartbeat and when his pacemaker kicks in, and yet we don’t have access to most of this, we have no control over who’s using it. It’s very valuable, and yet, we as the people manufacturing it don’t seem to have any say over who's using it or what they're doing with it. And I think that’s got to change. I think that we have to have the ability to decide what we share and what we don’t. I read recently that there was a credit card company that admitted that they were actually looking at people‘s Facebook profiles and that people that were listening to rap music were given a lower credit rating score because somehow, statistically, people listen to rap music were somehow a more of a credit risk. My twelve year old listens to rap music. The fact that there are algorithms and programs out there that are making decisions about my ability to get credit, that I have no idea on what I’m being judged by, what books I read, who I talk to, what music I’m listening to. This is very scary stuff. The whole point of doing this Human Face of Big Data project, which was sponsored, by the way, by EMC, one of the largest players in the big data space, but they - I’m a journalist, so they had no right of review or censorship. They didn’t even see this project 'til the book and the iPad app came out. They basically gave us the ability to kind of start this global conversation. . . . A lot of my friends in the journalism world, who are hearing about big data for the first time, have said to me, well, is this just a big promotion for big data? Is it just, yay, big data’s going to solve all of our problems? My response has been that every time there’s a new tool, whether it's Internet or cell phones or anything else, all these things can be used for good or evil. Technology is neutral; it depends on how it’s used. So I think that what I’m trying to do, what I’m hoping that the Human Face of Big Data project will do, is to get people talking and thinking about this in a way that perhaps is thought provoking and disturbing and exciting. I mean, there’s a lot of stories in the book where you go, that’s so cool; that’s wonderful. I love this! A lot of people believe that the ability to measure - instead of doing a random sampling, which is what we used to do; we used to go out and ask people, twenty thousand people a question, and they would say, this is what everybody thinks. We're able to do much more nuance now. We're almost able to poll people all over the world at the same time. There’s five million people now that carry cell phones, particularly in the developing world. So we're actually - a lot of people have been speculating that soon we may be able to actually measure the heartbeat of everybody on earth simultaneously, which is kind of a fascinating idea. What would that mean if you could actually listen to this global heartbeat and actually sense this pattern of behavior across the planet in the course of a day? I mean, in a way Twitter has become that. Twitter has become sort of a new way of sort of listening in on the conversation in real time. So, there’s a lot of questions out there. Big data is a brand new tool; we’ve never seen anything quite like this before, and I hope people will turn the pages of the book and want to share the stories with each other.
Background
Smolan is a 1972 graduate of Dickinson College and co-created the best-selling Day in The Life Series photography series with David Elliot Cohen who are credited for creating the mass market for large-format illustrated books.[4] Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, co-founders of Against All Odds Productions, have produced a number of global crowd sourcing projects. Fortune Magazine selected Against All Odds Productions as One of the 25 Coolest Companies in America.[5]
More than five million of his books have been sold around the world, many have appeared on The New York Times best-seller lists and have been featured on the covers of Fortune, Time, and Newsweek.[6] Smolan is also a member of the CuriosityStream Advisory Board.[7]
Data collection projects
In 2012 Smolan and co-author Erwitt published The Human Face of Big Data, a book in which Smolan and Erwitt used various photographs, graphics, and information to make big data easier to comprehend and absorb on a more personal, relatable level.[6] [Human Face of Big Data] focusing on humanity's new ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data in real time.[6]
In 2000 Smolan organized The Planet Project: Your Voice, Your World, one of the largest real-time internet polls in internet history, with the aim to get answers from over 1.5 million people in more than 240 countries on how they felt about their lives at the dawn of the new millennium.[8]
Notable works
From Alice to Ocean is a collection of photographs Smolan took of Robyn Davidson's 1,700-mile trek across the deserts of central and Western Australia that National Geographic Magazine sponsored. Davidson's writings along with Smolan's photographs became a National Geographic cover story. An autobiographical account of her trek was later published in 1980 as a book entitled Tracks, which included some of Smolan's photographs.[9][10]
In 1996, Smolan and Erwitt published the Day in the Life book 24 Hours in Cyberspace: Painting on the Walls of the Digital Cave, a collection of photographs from 150 photojournalists, with the intention to, over a 24-hour period, chronicle how the internet was beginning to have a profound effect on the daily lives of people around the world.[11][12] 24 Hours in Cyberspace (February 8, 1996) was "the largest one-day online event" up to that date, headed by Smolan with Jennifer Erwitt, Tom Melcher, Samir Arora and Clement Mok.[13][14][15]
In 2003 Smolan and Cohen published America 24/7.[16]America At Home, UK at Home, and America 24/7 encapsulates various perspectives on life by inviting the public to submit images, and enabled readers to place their own photographs within or on the book.[17]
In November 2007 Smolan and Erwitt published Blue Planet Run : The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World, a series of photos illustrating attempts around the world to bring fresh drinking water to various communities suffering from lack of clean and consistent water supply.
In 2009, Smolan published Obama Time Capsule, which incorporated photos of Obama's first campaign for presidential office and his first 100 days in office. It includes commentary from various notable people including Arianna Huffington and General Colin Powell.[18] 'The Obama Time Capsule was also published in a form where each book was printed separately and readers could include their own contributions and photos to personalize the individual book they would receive.[19]
Smolan teamed up with Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald to "create the first user-generated feature-length documentary film shot on a single day" for YouTube underwritten project Life in a Day.[20] This historic global film experiment enlists the global community to capture a moment of their lives on Saturday, July 24, 2010. Against All Odds Productions, Smolan's company, distributed "cameras to individuals in remote regions of the world in an effort to ensure that the film is as inclusive and representative as possible".[20]
An Australian film based on Davidson's book, called Tracks, was released in August 2013, starring Mia Wasikowska as Davidson and Adam Driver as Smolan.[21] In 2015 Smolan published Inside Tracks:Alone Across the Outback via a successful Kickstarter campaign.[22] The project was released in conjunction with the North American film premiere in late 2014 of the film, and combines Smolan's photographs, excerpts from Davidson's book, images from the film, and an interactive app.[23]
Most recently Smolan and Erwitt created The Good Fight: America's Ongoing Struggle for Justice. The book captures many aspects of the struggles of Americans who have experienced hatred, oppression or bigotry because of their gender, skin color, country of origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability or beliefs over the past 100 years. The book features more than 180 photographs, 63 embedded videos, over a dozen essays plus examples of music and lyrics that accompanied or inspired the struggle.[citation needed]
The Good Fight became one of Amazon's top 100 books within a week after it was released, and People magazine chose it as one of the "10 Best Books of the Year". The TED organization sent a copy to all 1,500 members as the official TED Book Club selection. The book won numerous awards including The Independent Book Publishers' “Freedom Fighter” Award, and Ben Franklin Association awards for “History" and “Politics and Current Events".[citation needed]
References
- ^ "Rick Smolan, National Portrait Gallery". www.portrait.gov.au. Retrieved 2019-03-01.
- ^ Against All Odds: The team
- ^ "Human Face of Big Data". book sales. Barnes and Noble. Retrieved 16 May 2014.
- ^ Halstead, Dirck. "Resetting book Publishing". The Digital Journalist. Retrieved 20 May 2014.
- ^ REESE, JENNIFER. "FORTUNE VISITS 25 COOL COMPANIES".
- ^ a b c Campbell, Mikey. "The Human Face of Big Data app humanizes growing world of data analytics". Apple Insider. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
- ^ "CuriosityStream Advisory Board". Retrieved 31 August 2015.
- ^ "Rick Smolan: Reinventing the Picture Book (2009-11-17)".
- ^ "Robyn Davidson on Deserts, Nomads and Writing (2012-10-22)".
- ^ "One hell of a life, born of claypan and coolabah (2012-10-22)".
- ^ "TED Speakers: Rick Smolan".
- ^ "'24 Hours,' 8 Months and 1 Book Later (1996-10-24)".
- ^ "Tuesday, September 9, 1997: Monthly Program (BayCHI)". www.baychi.org. Retrieved 2016-06-21.
- ^ "Rick Smolan, Dave Winer, Jorn Barger and the Genealogy of Blogging as Network 2000 | Tawawa.org". tawawa.org. Retrieved 2016-06-21.
- ^ "Clement Mok :: On Record :: Article". www.clementmok.com. Archived from the original on 2016-04-21. Retrieved 2016-06-21.
- ^ "Book has photographers capturing 'America 24/7' (2003-10-28)".
- ^ Spicer, Beverly. "Book Review". The Digital Journalist. Retrieved 22 May 2014.
- ^ "The Obama Time Capsule: A Participatory Book Breaks New Ground".
- ^ "Dickinson News 2009". Archived from the original on 2013-10-12.
- ^ a b Hollywood News. "Ridley Scott wants to see your "Life in a Day"".
- ^ "Mia Wasikowska stars in film of Robyn Davidson's book 'Tracks', about camel journey across Australia (2013-8-30)".
- ^ Campaign, Kickstarter. "Inside Tracks Successful Kickstarter Campaign".
- ^ Coleman, Sarah J. "The Longest Journey: An Interview with Rick Smolan".
External links
- Rick Smolan interviewed on the TV show Triangulation on the TWiT.tv network
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