Social Media and Photography

This week's readings focused on how digital technology has changed the relationships and hierarchies between viewers, producers and the distribution of the image.

First we read Lev Manovich's writing The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life:  From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production? He begins by discussing how user created media has allowed social media to develop into what it has become "Web 2.0."  The web 2.0 marks shifts in how the web is both produced and consumed.  For example, in web 2.0 there was a shift from users accessing content produced by a small number of professionals to nonprofessional user created content.
This user created content is the driving force behind the Web 2.0, which can better be understood through Michel de Carteau's strategies and tactics.  Strategies are the institutional power structures that are in place to set order.  Tactics are the ways in which individuals move through the strategies.  According to Manovich, strategies and tactics have developed into less distinct entities.  This is because products are now designed to be customized by users, that is nonprofessionals, which is a corporate strategy that mimics tactics.  These corporations that celebrate user created content use this strategy in order to control and develop the mass production of cultural objects by users.  This can be seen in how most user created content either follows the corporate template of "professional" content or reuses professional created content.
In oder to aid with the development of user created content, platforms to host this content were made.  Thus social media sites began to take over the internet, making user created content even more possible.  Individuals began to pour their lives out on the web making what was once private now public.  This also means that these companies developed an interest in where and how users create their content, because the more people use their sites for content, the more money they can make.
The conclusion of this article poses the question of whether or not professional art can survive through this time of extreme democratization of the web.  He states that while this question may be meaningless, in that modern art has never been so commercially successful and that in general there has never been more interest in a contemporary art scene, he also does recognize that the innovations by nonprofessionals has put a dent in the institution of art.  Still though, he suggest that the "excellent cultural work produced by students and nonprofessionals" is not the biggest challenge for art, but rather how the web 2.0 constantly and rather unpredictably changes the game.

The next article by Jason Evans was Online Photographic Thinking.  This article is a call to arms for photographers to grasp the new dynamics of the web and use them to their advantage.  He beings by explaining how underwhelmed he is by photography's presence online and that the digital versus analog debate is tired since photographs still do function on screen.  He does state that images on screen are slightly different in that they have lost their objectness, but that it was this loss that allows an engagment specifically with the image.  His overall argument is that he wants people to engage themselves with the potential of the democratization of the affordable distribution network given to them through the web.

TheDailyNice.com 11.14.11

We were also given six responses to this article, with each response, except the first, responding to the article itself as well as previous responses.  This conversational development where space and time are of no concern, is another characteristic of Manovich's web 2.0, but I digress.
There was a general agreement throughout these responses in that although they also saw that taking advantage of the internet for photography was important, it was not yet time for this to occur because as of right now there is nothing to be lost by placing images on the internet.  If someone or no one accesses a persons' work online, that person is the only one who knows or cares.  Also, when your images are online, they become impermanent since one cannot control how someone views the image.  This is not a sustained way of viewing work, unlike when it is placed in a gallery setting, where people take more time to view.

The last article was Digital Images, Photo-Sharing and our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics by Susan Murray.  In this article Murray outlines how social media, and specifically the photo-sharing site Flickr, has changed not only the hierarchies of professional and nonprofessional photographers, but also who can and will begin a conversation about the images.
She begins by giving a brief history of amateur photography, where at the turn of the century there were those who took images for fun, also known as amateurs, and those who were engaged in art for leisure, known as serious amateurs.  This continued until the 1950's when Kodak commercialized amateur photography by defining it as the special moments in domestic life.  After that, the next change was during the 1960's and 1970's where the snapshot aesthetic became a viable choice and the mediums reliability of a vehicle for reality was challenged.  This then brings us to the development of consumer digital cameras, which forever changed the genre from the special and precious image to an everyday and fleeting one.
Through the use of these individual digital cameras a worldwide network of digital image systems began to appear. These systems, such as Flickr, have changed photography's connections to history, memory, loss, absence and death to transience and motion.  This occurs through the daily diary aspects of Flickr, where the images that are seen first are often being replaced by new images.  In this way the old images move to make way for the new, forever giving motion to an otherwise still object.  This continual movement places less importance on single images, which are now visually disposable.
For Murray, the people that use these sites are what should be taken into account when discussing digital photography.  This is because even though these people understand the ability of images to be manipulated, this does not lead them to immediately question the truth of images, as previously discussed in almost all analog versus digital debates.
Murray wraps up this discussion with how the comment function of sites like Flickr allow for a community to develop through a group understanding of norms, values and systems.  It is in the development of these communities that the line between amateur and professional is disappearing.  This erasing is because of the exclusion and marginalization of the content that can happen during the development of said communities. She concludes that sites like Flickr have forever altered our relationship to the image.

The Machine Is Us/ing Us
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