People buy digital cameras in Norway this summer, and according to an article in Aftenposten this makes spouses argue as wives protest. The husbands want the pictures on file and are quite happy with that - the wives feel that they won't have any paper copies for their albums, and protests against digitalised pictures.

This assumes quite a few things about Norwegian households and modern technology: 1) Men buy the technology. 2) Men use the technology (take the pictures). 3) Women process the outcome of the use of the technology (make the albums). 4) Women use the product (pass the albums around), particularly for network-building and maintainance. 5) Women haven't grasped the idea of processing through technology (getting a photography printer). 6) Women don't email pictures to their friends.

I would have loved to see a study of the use of slides. Slides are similar to digital pictures in that you need some particular technology in order to access them. You need to take them to the photographer in order to copy them to paper and glue them in an album. What I'd like to know is, did the women say: "No, don't use that film!" when their husbands took slides or perhaps even made little movies with old-fasioned film cameras? And did they protest the move into video, because they couldn't look at the tiny pictures on the tape without using special technology?

Me? I am going to look for that credit-card sized little logitech camera this summer.... despite the fact that I know we have five other cameras which will all give better pictures. But then again - colleagues have claimed for a decade that I am not really a woman.