What Do I think when photography never invented

I'm assuming no video cameras either. Somehow capturing light with a lens is impossible or prohibitively expensive. No camera invention. At all.

I'd imagine things would have remained unchanged until the invention of computers and computer displays. The invention of computer generated graphics would change the world. Suddenly a guy with a halfway decent computer can bash out a nifty looking magazine cover AND do the spreadsheets for sales. The rush of money towards this new technology would sweep technology companies onward and upwards as everybody is fascinated by this new medium.

As tech develops people branch into generating things in real time, a practice known as tracing. Baseball players now have nodes sewn into their uniforms to allow the sensors around the stadium and under the turf relay this information back to massive warehouse-sized computers that generate shitty polygon models with a fifteen minute lag. This tech advances rapidly when the military decides the machines could be used for DoD purposes. Very hush hush. The idea of watching something "live" in your home becomes a reality.

The world would be CGI. Every meme, every trace file, every picture would be CGI. Or painted. Or sketched. The conventional means would soom be outsripped by Imageshop once the program enters elementary art classes. Computers everywhere.

Where would we be? Would communication be fundamentally changed? How would advertising, books, magazines or other publications be affected? What if it was invented, just one hundred years later (1900s instead of 1800s), or even if it was invented today? Would artists have a larger role? Would family portraits be a normal occurrence for the average family? What would the world look like? I'd just like to see where this goes. For the sake of argument, we are assuming that the pinhole camera existed, but was not heavily used. The daguerreotype and other early "cameras" would have all been made within 50 years of each other, if they were ever made at all.

Maybe outstripped was the wrong word, I imagined the new tech as easier than conventional art. With enough practice you could paint a Rembrandt in MS paint, imagine if you had been taught how to so stuff like that for a portion of every art class with little kids. Tablets are making this more like painting right now, if there were only a few other alternatives and CGI was the only way to get stuff on a screen (No light capture in ny world) I'd think there would be a huge want for skilled Cgi artists.

Tracing was just an adaptation of the stuff used to make Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. A man in a special suit gets himself edited out for polygons.