I started thinking about this when I was in China, and all kinds of random Chinese people were taking pictures of me. I knew they were taking the pictures, but I will never see those pictures. How many other pictures, accidental or on purpose, exist out there of me… of you… of us all?
We take so many pictures now, and so many picture are taken. You are probably in thousands of photos that you know of, but maybe hundreds of thousands of photos you don’t know about, just in the background with your back turned.
Bad news is, and you are going to hate me for this, I have no idea. Good news is, by reading this, you are helping make sure that someone out there tries to find out.
I want someone to find out! I want some statistics or sociology or anthropology or some other ology grad student or maybe a professor to figure this out.
Obviously, you would never be able to come up with an exact number, but I am sure with a couple of million dollars in funding, someone can come up with some algorithms to get pretty close.
Are you a grad student or a professor and you want to tackle this problem, but you don't know where to get the funding?
Here it is. Convince some camera or tech company to give you the money. They can probably write off some of that expense, and when you are done, they can build a website with your research.
Think about it. Not everyone has the same exposure. Brad Pitt probably has 100-1000 times more photos of himself floating around out there than my friend who doesn't let anyone take her picture. People can come to this website, enter some information about themselves, and bam! The computer spits out a number. People will love this website. It will go viral in no time. Plus, the information can be relevant marketing info.
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