No Context For You – July 08th

To about 99.99% of us, this is a “You took this picture on purpose? WHY??” image. It’s ordinary, routine, boring, background, about as noteworthy and memorable as a bucket of old, cold, filthy mop water.

To about 00.01% of us, that’s exactly why the picture got taken. It’s routine and ordinary, but it’s a tiny bit of life that will someday be forgotten, a jumble of detail that actually say quite a bit about us with its patterns and flaws.

And having one of those brains, I can’t help but wonder what an alien intelligence would make of it, desperate for information about us, trying to understand and learn. How many boring, routine, ordinary pictures like this would it take to build up a semi-detailed picture or simulation of our world, to fill it with context?

But it’s just one picture, without explanation, without the accompanying Muzak. No context for you, at least not without much more content to build an overarching context in which this image adds additional context.