Mashed Articles

Light is electromagnetic radiation. In particular it’s that part of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes are sensitive to: it ranges in wavelength from about 400nm (violet) to 700nm (red). Beyond red light we come to infrared (IR). Like ordinary light, infrared (or specifically near infrared) can be focussed by glass lenses and recorded by the CCD in a digital camera.

Infrared photography can be used to produce interesting ghostly effects, but all cameras are different so test yours before buying any pricey gear. (Click the photo for a high resolution version.)

By excluding all visible light from the camera while allowing infrared to pass, it’s possible to take photographs using infrared alone. White clouds can appear against an almost black sky and green vegetation comes out so white that it almost glows. The end result has been variously described as otherworldly, ethereal and ghostly.

If you don’t want to fake the effect (see ‘Fake Infrared Ektachrome’ later in the article), you’ll need to collect together a little bit of kit to do this right. First, infrared photographs usually require a long exposure so you’ll need a tripod. However, if you don’t already have one, hold off on buying one until you’ve tried a test infrared photograph. If you just happen to have a camera that’s unusually sensitive to infrared you might get away with using it handheld, but it’s unlikely. Small tripods start at about £10.

Choosing a filter

The next consideration is an infrared filter. For your first attempts at infrared photography we suggested that you use the Hoya R72 filter. Its cut-off point is only just into the infrared spectrum, which means it actually lets a small amount of visible red light through too. If you’re pleased with your initial foray into infrared photograph and want to go one stage further, you could try other infrared filters that have cut-off points further into the infrared spectrum. The infrared effect will be even more pronounced and dramatic, but exposure times will be increased.

The Hoya R72 has a 50 per cent cut-off point of 720nm. The Kodak Wratten #87 has a corresponding figure of 795nm and excludes all visible light. The Wratten #87C has an 850nm 50 per cent cut-off and this is probably as far as you’d want to go. Although Wratten filters are supplied as 75mm square gelatine sheets that aren’t easy to attach to your lens, manufacturers of screw-in filters often refer to an equivalent Wratten number.

But before you buy, make sure it’s actually going to work with your camera…

Preparatory work

Although CCDs are extremely sensitive to infrared, many digital cameras aren’t. This is because manufacturers usually put a filter in the camera to block infrared, as it would otherwise upset the colour balance. These filters aren’t 100 per cent effective so some infrared still reaches the CCD, but exactly how sensitive a camera is to infrared varies greatly. Your first job is to check that your camera is sensitive enough to be usable.

The unusually high reflectivity of grass and foliage is responsible for the unreal look of infrared photographs. (Click the photo for a high resolution version.)

The easiest way to do this is to ask a local photographic shop if you can try an infrared filter before you buy. Here we’re talking about a filter that allows infrared to pass through while blocking visible light. Remember that the light meter might be wildly inaccurate under these conditions, so if you don’t get an image on your first attempt, try over-exposing by several stops if necessary. Another option is to use a TV or DVD remote control unit, since all such devices emit infrared light. If your camera allows the LCD panel to be used as a viewfinder, view the infrared emitter at the front end of the remote on the LCD panel and press one of the remote’s buttons in a dark room. A bright dot indicates that the camera has reasonable infrared sensitivity. If you have a digital SLR that can’t use its LCD panel as a viewfinder you’ll have to try a test photograph, again bearing in mind that you might have to over-expose.

Once you’ve discovered that your camera can be used for infrared photography and bought an infrared filter, you can start to get a better feel for what sort of exposure you’ll need under various conditions. Screw the filter onto your lens and try some test shots. The exposure will be much longer than normal and could be several seconds, even on a bright day. On the basis of these trials you can decide whether there’s any chance of shooting handheld or if you’ll need to use a tripod. The other piece of information you’ll glean from this test is whether the camera’s light meter is accurate in infrared and, if not, by how much you’ll need to over-expose.

Capturing the invisible

If you’ve got this far we’ll assume that you have an adequately sensitive camera, have bought an infrared filter and have decided whether you need to use a tripod. Now you’re ready to pack your gear up and try your hand at some infrared photography. First, though, a word on your choice of a subject.

We don’t want to be too prescriptive because this can stifle creativity, but perhaps we can offer a few suggestions to get you started. Remember the unique characteristics of infrared photographs – the blackening of blue skies and ghostly white rendering of grass and tree leaves – and pick your scene accordingly. Trees in the summer against a blue sky might look quite dramatic whereas an overcast scene of a bracken-covered moor almost certainly won’t. Try looking at the work of others for inspiration – you’ll find no shortage of infrared photo galleries on the web. You’ll soon see that some subjects seem to work whereas other just don’t, and you’ll also discover that some scenes are almost compulsory for infrared photographers. Perhaps the all-time favourite cliché is the graveyard, which seems to be perfectly suited to the ghostly look of infrared.

This might be a cliché, but every infrared photographer has to shoot a graveyard sooner or later. (Click the photo for a high resolution version.)

Taking a shot should now be plain sailing but there’s one possible snag – you might not be able to see anything in the viewfinder with the infrared filter attached. If you have an independent optical viewfinder you’ll be OK, but you may or may not be able to see the scene in an LCD viewfinder, depending on the camera. With a conventional DSLR the viewfinder will almost certainly be blank. If you aren’t able to see through the viewfinder, you’ll have to frame the shot before fixing the filter –so you’ll have to use a tripod.

Infrared photographs will rarely be up to scratch straight out of the camera, so image processing will almost always be necessary. First, although infrared photograph is a form of black-and-white photography, your photograph probably has some colour cast. Often the raw photograph will be in shades or red, so your first job is to convert it to greyscale. Even if the result does appear to be black and white, you should still to convert it to greyscale to ensure accurate blacks and whites. Then, because high contrast is often important in infrared photography, you might decide to exaggerate it by artificially increasing the contrast. Ensure you only ever edit a copy – leave the original intact so that you can try something different later if you want.

Infrared colour photography

Infrared is normally considered a form of black-and-white photography, so infrared colour photography sounds like a contradiction in terms. However, it’s possible to create a photograph that contains some colour information yet has the tonal quality of an infrared photograph.

First, take a pair of photographs of the scene, one in infrared and the other normally in visible light. This means that the camera must be mounted on a tripod and that nothing in shot is moving. It’s also important to use the same aperture for the two shots so that the depth of field is the same. Try to work as quickly as possible so that the lighting or slow-moving clouds don’t change much between the shots. You need to add or remove a filter between shots and probably alter the exposure, which could be tricky. It’s a good idea to give this process a bit of thought before trying it out for real.

Process the infrared photograph as already described for ordinary infrared photography. Now, using your photo-editing software, split the ordinary photograph into either the HLS (Hue, Lightness, Saturation) or HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) channels – the two are slightly different so try experimenting with both. Splitting channels is a feature of most fully featured photo editing packages, although it might be absent on entry-level products. Each channel appears as a greyscale image, of which one – lightness or brightness – defines the lightness. Since we want to impart the tonal qualities of an infrared image, discard the brightness or lightness channel and put the infrared image in its place before recombining the channels. The result should be quite an eye-opener.

Combining an ordinary photograph with an infrared shot can create dramatic colour effects. (Click the photo for a high resolution version.)

This is just one way of creating a colour infrared image and the possibilities are limited only by your imagination. Here’s another method that has been widely used, but be aware that the exact result will differ from one camera to another – so you might end up with a different effect entirely. And if the infrared image as it comes out of your camera appears black and white this method won’t work at all. Take an infrared photograph but, instead of converting it to a greyscale image, use your photo manipulation package to correct the white balance. Although the colours won’t be correct it will result in some parts of the photograph coming out almost white instead of shades of pink. The sky will appear red or brown, which looks most odd. To correct this you need to use the channel splitting and recombining trick. But instead of splitting to HLS or HSB, split the photograph to RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and then recombine with the Red and Blue channels swapped. With a bit of luck you’ll end up with a blue sky, while any foliage will have a slight sepia hue to its ghostly appearance.

Fake an infrared photograph

For many, the appeal of infrared photography is that it’s a natural phenomenon that can’t be recreated by digital wizardry. However, if you don’t want to shell out on an infrared filter you can get a similar (albeit less dramatic) effect using image-processing software.

Take an ordinary colour photograph and make sure it’s one with a really dark blue sky and light, well-lit foliage. Using your photo-editing software, split the channels to RGB and then discard the blue channel, recombine the remaining two channels and convert to greyscale. This will have the same effect as putting a red filter on the camera – it darkens the sky but not as dramatically as happens with an infrared filter. The glowing white appearance of the foliage will be absent, though, so let’s try something different. Again split the colour photograph to RGB and discard the blue channel. Before recombining, though, try increasing the brightness of the green channel. Now when you recombine you’ll find that the foliage has become lighter but, because all but the darkest azure blue skies contain some green content, the sky won’t be as dark. A degree of trial and error is required to find a compromise that comes close to the genuine infrared effect.

Simulate infrared ektachrome

For many years Kodak produced a film called Infrared Ektachrome, which produced a colour infrared image. That image was very different from the colour images we’ve discussed in the main part of this article because the film was intended for scientific rather than artistic purposes. Nevertheless, some mainstream photographers did experiment with it for its novelty value, and it’s quite possible to emulate it digitally.

An ordinary colour photograph is made up of images in the three primary colours – red, green and blue. Infrared can be though of as another colour so Infrared Ektachrome recorded an image in three alternative primary colours – infrared, red and green. Because our eyes can’t see the infrared, each primary colour was translated so that infrared appeared as red, red as green and green as blue. Because our eyes can only handle three primary colours, blue was discarded by putting a yellow filter over the lens. This combination of infrared and colour was used in aerial photography because it showed up features than couldn’t be seen in visible light alone. Normal crops, for example, appeared red because they’re highly reflective of infrared whereas diseased crops looked blue because they only reflected green light.

A different way of combining a visible and an infrared shot gives results reminiscent of Infrared Ektachrome film. (Click the photo for a high resolution version.)

To create this effect you need to take a pair of photographs, one in visible light and one in the infrared and combine them in a photo manipulation package. This time, however, split the visible image to RGB, discard the blue channel and recombine with the infrared image in place or the red channel, the red in place of the green, and the green in place of the blue.

Near and far

Infrared photography is often thought as a means of seeing in the dark. But the far infrared radiation (or heat) emitted by living creatures, is recorded. It’s also possible to use near infrared to photograph in the dark, but because most objects don’t emit near infrared you need a source of infrared illumination. A flashgun with an infrared filter over it will do nicely.

Although many insects can see ultraviolet, few creatures have vision that extends into the infrared. Research has suggested that birds of prey can see longer wavelengths than humans, but they probably don’t perceive this near infrared as an extra colour – so you have the potential to capture scenes that no living creature has ever seen.

This model was created by Andrew Comb. It took six years to model in Lightwave 3D, and has a total of nine million polygons.

Once upon a time, a handful of pixels madeth the space invader. Graphics were iconic, not representative: a picture on the box or manual showed you what it was meant to look like, and your mind filled in the necessary gaps. Nobody could have predicted that in just 20 years, we’d be immersing ourselves in realistic living cities, flying over gorgeous tropical islands and going head-to-head with astoundingly rendered characters – and not even being particularly impressed. But in years to come, modern games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Crysis will look just as dated as the classics we remember from the days of yore. In fact, they’ll probably look more so: while the simplicity of a retro game’s look has a certain charm to it, old 3D titles tend to flat-out look old. Try almost any hit game of the mid-to-late ’90s for proof of that.

3D is about more than just pretty graphics. Done right, it makes gameworlds come alive. A 2D sprite can only do what it’s been drawn to do, while a 3D character has a complete endoskeleton and can respond naturally (at least in theory) to anything that happens – the classic example being ‘ragdolls’, where a fallen enemy doesn’t simply slump to the ground in a canned animation, but tumbles off the railing and lands with one arm draped over a step.

You can create worlds rather than merely levels, unlocking the player’s ability to truly explore and experience the world as the character would. You can build simulations ready to be poked and prodded, abused and enjoyed.

It’s phenomenally powerful, to the point that many nominally 2D games are now really 3D ones viewed from a locked perspective, so that they can better use the possibilities of animation, physics and art assets. Why render hundreds of frames of animation you may not be happy with when you can make a model and keep tweaking it until it’s perfect? You may lose some of the old-school charm, but you gain far more.

Dawn of a dimension

The first big 3D success was Battlezone, a tank game released in 1980 that used vector graphics to create its work, much like Asteroids. While a simple game by modern standards, it was fiendishly complex for such an early example, offering the ability to go anywhere in an (admittedly featureless) world, hide from attacks and fight enemies.

Battlezone was thought to be so realistic that the US Army used it to train tank gunners.

Not impressive enough? In 1987, the first Freescape game, Driller, hit the shelves. It offered a full 3D world on platforms as basic as the Spectrum, and was an actual game rather than just a tech demo. Next to that, it didn’t matter that it was ugly, the frame-rate was abysmal and the game itself wasn’t actually much fun – it got lots of attention.

The Freescape engine in its various forms was used in several famous releases, including Castle Master and its sequel, and the all-out 3D Construction Kit. Legend has it that someone somewhere once made something other than a surreal, unplayable mess in this, but we never saw it. Freescape also made it onto TV, in the form of the absolutely atrocious Craig Charles vehicle Cyberzone, one of the most toe-curling attempts at creating a games-related TV show ever. Thankfully, all that remains of it is a single YouTube clip – and that’s painful enough. Most of the early 3D games stuck to simpler technologies. These days, we think of 3D as free-roaming, real-time engines, but back in the day, simply getting a game to look 3D was impressive. As early as 1981, games were achieving this feat – 3D Monster Maze was terrifying a generation with its slowly updating screens and roaming T-Rex, and the first Ultima game was offering a very advanced hybrid of block-by-block movement 3D graphics for its dark dungeons alongside a top-
down 2D overworld for exploration.

Interestingly, while most developers kept pushing further towards 3D, Ultima ended up pulling back, switching entirely to a top-down sprite-based system for the series’ glory days. The 3D element later developed into its own spin-off – the Ultima Underworld games – before returning for the series’ sadly disappointing final outing – the buggy, system-murdering Ultima IX: Ascension.

Faking it

The problem has always been the same: the potential of 3D fights with the limitations of current systems, whether it’s simply displaying the graphics in the first place or making them look as good as other art styles. Going back to an early ’90s 3D game now is almost painful. Flat faces, non-moving lips during conversations, stick-figure character models, smeary textures and appalling animation… the list of problems goes on. Some games got past this, sometimes bizarrely – most obviously Core Design’s legendary heroine Lara Croft, who managed to become an international sex symbol despite looking like a pointy-chested Pinocchio. Most survived simply because playing a 3D game felt futuristic, even if the lack of polygons our PCs could push out meant that 2D games were usually much more detailed.

For much of 3D’s history, the trick has been getting the effect of the third dimension without having to do it for real. The early Wing Commander games gave the illusion that you were flying through 3D space, but really they were just scaling sprites up and down. In first-person shooters, it quickly became clear that walls were easy thanks to their incredibly simple geometry, but snarling hellbeasts dripping blood from their fangs were asking a bit too much. So developers compromised. The worlds themselves were made in 3D, initially just as mazes. Then, as texturing became more advanced, more realistic-looking areas were created, like those in Catacomb 3D.

Interestingly, the state of the art varied dramatically across genres. Shooters had to be fast and fluid, so they were kept simple. In the case of early games like Core Design’s Corporation, things were stripped down so much that the engine didn’t even bother with textures. Id’s first breakout hit – Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 – had textures to depict the inside of its supposed Nazi castle stronghold, but all the maps were completely flat and the interaction was limited to just opening doors and shooting enemies. Ultima Underworld, which came out in the same year, had sloped surfaces, advanced lighting effects, dialogue, puzzles, magic systems, physics, 3D objects, a real plot, the ability to look up and down instead of having your view locked straight ahead and much more.

Ultima Underworld could afford to push these limits because as a role-playing game, it was inherently slower than a shooter, and the audience was more willing to accept the necessary limitations, like the small viewing window. It didn’t hurt that while publisher Origin’s official motto was ‘We Create Worlds’, its unofficial credo was ‘Your PC Will Cry’. It never did worry about system requirements…

Two and a half dimensions

For performance and sales reasons, most games were stuck in what was dubbed 2.5D until the launch of Quake in 1996. Quake wasn’t the first genuinely full-3D shooter in the modern style, but it was the one that made 2.5D officially obsolete. These faux 3D or 2.5D games were flat maps, where areas could be raised and lowered (and in later games like Duke Nukem 3D, sloped), but you couldn’t have one room on top of another. Some games pretended otherwise, but it was generally a trick – the player would be silently teleported as they crossed the room’s threshold. Descent provided a full 3D world made up of polygons in 1995, but only a basic one – it was a series of sprawling mineshafts. The Star Wars game Dark Forces offered rooms above rooms, but otherwise stuck to the standard technologies on display in any other shooter of its era, including sprites.

First-person shooter bosses like this were unheard of before Quake was released in 1996. Now, they’re standard issue.

Sprites were a growing problem. By the mid ’90s, level design was getting more and more impressive. By modern standards, the opening cinema level in Duke Nukem Forever is empty and unconvincing, but to an audience used to bland military base corridors and castles, the realism was incredible.

Almost all these games were able to do this because they saved their 3D for the world. Actual characters were pre-drawn 2D images, pasted in to the game. Not only did they increasingly look weak, not part of the scenery and incredibly blocky up-close, but they also didn’t fit. Games could scale sprites to deal with the player getting closer to and further away from them, but when they started offering the ability to look up and down (first made popular with Heretic, a 1994 fantasy game) the effect showed its limits, with sprites shearing and increasingly looking like the cardboard cutouts they were.

A little voodoo magic

Games had to get more advanced, but the performance wasn’t there. Quake brought full-3D worlds and enemies to the field in 1996, but at the cost of visuals. Technically, they were better, and the improvement in animation was stunning – an early sequence where a snarling Fiend leaps out of a door to attack the player directly is one of many gamers’ fondest memories, to say nothing of the first episode’s room-
sized, lava-throwing monster Cthon. But the world was still drab, ugly and simplistic, with enemies that looked like they’d been knocked into shape with a sledgehammer and textures that would have lowered the tone in a morgue. Like all graphics technology, this quickly improved over the next few years, but it was increasingly obvious that simply throwing more CPU power at games wasn’t going to cut it.

Not alone, anyway

Most people didn’t really see the need for dedicated video cards at first because, to put it bluntly, there wasn’t much of one. Games increasingly offered a high-end mode that offered a higher resolution and additional effects without a specific need for extra hardware – bar a hefty processor. This high-end mode slowly became the standard experience, yet it was a long time before video cards became mandatory for playing PC games. Even technical showpieces like the original Unreal would run in so-called ‘software mode’. There wasn’t one big game that marked the transition, more a slow giving into inevitability.

Dedicated 3D cards came into their own around 1997, with several competing, mutually incompatible brands fighting it out for dominance. By far the most successful was 3DFX with its Voodoo cards. Even now, with built-in low-end 3D a standard on motherboards, a separate 3D card is mandatory for most games. On the plus side, the dominance of DirectX means that you don’t need to worry too much about which card to buy.

Individually, the abilities offered by 3D cards don’t sound too exciting. In the late ’90s, the core functions were transformation, clipping and lighting – in short, getting the card to work out where items in the world were and how they should be lit. The next big advance was the addition of shaders. Shaders are additional calculations thrown into the rendering pipeline that work on individual pixels, vertices and pieces of geometry to add effects and change the final image. Examples include working out appropriate shadows, making a flag flutter or adding bump mapping (a texture that gives the illusion of raised and lowered areas on an object without the need to add polygons). More advanced shaders include motion blur and bloom effects, soft shadows, depth of field and volumetric lighting.

The new bottlenecks

With the technology burden eased (or at least partly passed onto the card manufacturers), developers could focus on making the most of what they had. Valve largely pioneered skeletal-based characters rather than keyframe-by-keyframe animated enemies in Half-Life, and Ritual went out of its way to create interactive elements such as hackable computers in the real-
world environments of Half-Life’s closest rival of the time, Sin. Ragdolls spread to every new game until the games that didn’t offer them felt stodgy and ancient in comparison. Most importantly, the new realism of these games finally let developers sink their teeth into genres that they’d never have been able to do as traditional corridor shooters. Grand Theft Auto III gave us a living city. A million games brought the horrors of World War II to life in glorious cinematic style.

Realistic character and facial animation is a surprisingly recent addition to gaming.

Problem solved? No, just replaced. Now the issue became one of creating all this in the first place. A simple maze-based 3D shooter could be churned out in under a year by a competent team, but building cities, battlefields and other real-world elements requires an immense number of assets. Games are much shorter than they used to be, not because they’re more complicated – in most cases, the features are more advanced but the thinking is more conservative – because of the amount of content required, and the cost of making it. There are shortcuts for some things, like the Speedtree libraries for procedurally generating a forest in a hurry (used in, among many others, Grand Theft Auto IV, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3), but in general, if a developer wants something, that developer has to make it himself.

Crysis 2 is the current state of the art: explore New York in the wake of an alien invasion.

Technology itself has also reached a plateau, not because there’s nothing more to do – nobody thinks that – but because right now, the big money is on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Both are relatively old machines, but that doesn’t matter. PC ports often allow for higher resolutions and sometimes let you switch on better graphics (Metro 2033 looks much better for instance, as will Crysis 2 when it lands) but it’s usually a token gesture. To put the graphical difference into context, many PlayStation 3 games don’t even use anti-aliasing to smooth out the edges of their polygons, and games on both platforms typically render at a lower resolution than the high-def numbers you’d expect from the systems’ marketing.

Feeling lonely on the internet is an odd sensation, but a survey from last month suggests it’s a growing problem. At the click of a mouse, you can connect with millions of people – and not just random members of the smelly flesh-army that is humanity, but people who share your interests, actually want to talk and may even type ‘LOL’ at your jokes.

It’s just not the same though. A whopping 60 per cent of tech-savvy people aged 18 to 35 are apparently complaining of often feeling lonely, as opposed to just 35 per cent of the traditionally isolated over-55s. This is the age group for whom services like Facebook have supposedly done wonders for staying in touch.

Obviously, all surveys of this ilk should be taken with a pinch of salt capable of melting a glacier, but this one wouldn’t surprise me. For starters, if you’re feeling down, sometimes a social service is the last thing you want to be plugged into. Either you’re one click away from seeing what a much better day everyone you know is having, whether they’re splashing on the beach or preparing for a party you’d have been blissfully unaware of not having been invited to, or it’s the interactive equivalent of a grey weekend in Norwich – everyone complaining of how much they’re sitting around in the rain, breaking up with their former loved ones, drowning in a treacle sea of underpaid work and just generally having a lousy epoch.

It’s a wider issue than just Facebook, though. Take gaming. Back in the day, you had just one console and friends would come round to play things like Mario Kart with you on a split-screen display. People would get together for LAN parties and head to cybercafés. Now, multiplayer gaming’s primarily done online, with players sitting alone and communicating on headphones. Not only are we separated by distance, we’re separated by our characters. Nobody ever called their friend ‘Yoshi’ during a Mario Kart race, but play something like World of Warcraft and if it’s not a character name you go by, you simply become ‘the tank’ or ‘the mage’ – just one cog out of 25.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule. Rock Band is a great example of a game where people still get together to play, as are a number of Wii games. In general though, as online games get more social, they’re getting lonelier. Even lonelier than single-player games in many ways, thanks to providing a weak, unsatisfying experience rather than an alternative. Social networking is increasingly following suit, with the sheer volume of content spewing out of the pipes. Recently, it’s just mass shouting. Nobody really cares what your Spotify playlists are, any more than clicking a Facebook ‘Like’ button can replace actually telling someone that you liked something. That’s not to say that these things can’t be useful in their own right – ‘Like’ buttons are fine for highlighting new content you might not otherwise have seen (seeing that someone’s watching a new show is good for remembering that it’s on), but it’s not so much social as a replacement for it. The lack of effort means that people are sharing more, but also that it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s the online equivalent of the ubiquitous ‘Alright, mate?’

One of the most surprising things about all this social interaction is how little it focuses on actual real-world connections, especially given the sheer weight of information in the much-ballyhooed social graphs everyone wants to build up. Take online dating for instance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg claims that by looking at online profiles, he can tell who’s going to hook up with whom, which is a good trick. Yet still Facebook lacks any real service that skips the usual questionnaires and glorified personal adverts in favour of just looking at your data and interests and saying ‘You, call You’. Foursquare focuses on checking into places and sharing that information, but only as far as making up silly games about mayors and meeting up with existing friends, not trying expand your real-life social network by suggesting: ‘Why not say hello to these people next time you’re there.’

There are so many things that social networking could offer if it focused more on the social side: actually meeting people and doing things, instead of just building endless lists of friends you hardly see any more. As it is, it’s providing endless ways of keeping us trapped at our PCs, making sure that our music choices and profile pictures say what we want them to, and that no friends will mock us for having an overgrown Farmville. No wonder so many of us are feeling lost in the cloud.