Daily Archives: July 5, 2019

July 5 – The Picture is Worth More than Nine Words


Facebook and its family of social media services, Instagram and WhatsApp, were a mess on Wednesday.  It turns out that you couldn’t post your pictures for nine hours.  Twitter lit up. People were angry and some were seriously anxious. Nine hours with no new selfie?

I think this is what you call a first world problem.

For nine long hours on Wednesday I could upload may latest favorite picture of me, but the photo would not display on my feed. Rather, Mark Zuckerberg’s robots scanned the photos and posted the verbal description of the photo that is used in a computer-generated voice description for the visually impaired.  Apparently, this is what the robots do with every photo we upload, it’s just that we usually see the photo and not the written description of it.  No word as to whether this was some sort of work slowdown on the part of the robots or if any of them will be disciplined for their slack work on Wednesday. Continue reading