Patricio Guzman's 'Nostalgia for the Light' is a wonderful documentary 'about' Atacama. It cuts between the scientists using the telescopes and a collection of women who have been scouring the desert for fragments of the bodies of loved ones discarded during the pinochet regime. Both are using the space to probe history, just very different kinds and at very different scales. Very powerful and instructive exploration of the (dead) body, grief, and the necessity of 'witnessing'. Highly recommend it to everyone here!
I get used to things. I have spent hundreds of hours using modern laptop computers to develop software, read articles, mindlessly consume social media content, watch porn. Because of these hundreds of hours, when I come to interact with my laptop computer, a set of pre-established affordances, feelings, and thought patterns immediately present themselves.
This goes away if I write in my notebook or type on my alphasmart, where a whole other host of feelings and thought patterns immediately appear. Usually, these are feelings and thought patterns that are localized to what I'm writing about, which makes writing (and thinking) much easier.
There's a lot of 'political' content on instagram. do a quick google search for 'politigram' and you'll see what I'm talking about. That being said, there are definitely per-platform affordances that may change the degree and extent to which its expressed (and, crucially, to whom).
While I'm not sure where I stand on this ruling, there's a flaw in this form of reasoning. Namely, I don't think this is merely (or at least usefully) reducible to 'efficiently editing a series of frames'. The ability to do so has emergent effects, and that should be taken seriously!
It's interesting, many people in this comment section are pointing out other places, like greece, the caspian sea, the black sea, where cats are found all over the urban environment. What all of these places share (including istanbul) is their proximity to water, and presumably, ports! When I was in istanbul, I remember someone saying that the cats, historically, would help tame the massive rat populations that often plague both port cities and the hulls of ships. I don't have a source to back this up, but its some food for thought!