Presentation: Ubiquitous photography and WEB 2.0 platform

Presentation: Ubiquitous photography and WEB 2.0 platform

Myself and Birutë where picked to do a presentation together on ubiquitous photography and Web 2.0 platform. We meet up a few times, mainly in the week prior the presentation, so the research would be fresh in our memory. It's a very interesting topic that we focused on that we all could somewhat have an impact on. Here are the presentation slides and my script notes:

Script Notes

Slide 2

Ubiquity, by definition means something that is ever present and everywhere so when we refer to ubiquitous photography, we refer to events, activities, moments, objects, and people that are 'captured' and distributed as images which, due to the rise of digital photography, imaging has transformed the landscape of visual communication and culture on an unprecedented scale. Many of these are shared publicly; some remain private, others become intellectual property, and some have the potential to shape global events via the use of social media platforms. One of the ways in which we understand the relationship between photography and ubiquity is through digitization and debates on new digital media concerned with the proliferation of photography in public and private life. Through this perspective, we have a sense that photography is no longer a discrete medium but one that has become hybridized through computer technology. Social media platforms referred to as Web2.0 use networking sites, user created Web sites, self-publishing platforms, tagging, and social bookmarking as its medium Flickr, Instagram, Kodak EasyShare, MyAlbum, Photobucket, Picasa are all examples of photographic based platforms. Talk about Flickr’s motto ‘Share your photos. Watch the world’ suggests the website links single photographic contributions to a naturalized, common view of the world. Behind this appealing slogan lie three assumptions that we would like to inform you on: the notion that sharing photos leads to collective perspectives, experiences and memory. 


Slide 4 

‘Flickr is an amazing community with sharing at its heart’, This motto refers to the supposed function of Flickr as a platform for shared experience and community building. Notions such as ‘sharing pictures’ are used interchangeably with ‘sharing experiences’ and are often mentioned in one and the same breath as ‘telling (life) stories’. For instance, information scientists Huang and Hsu (2006) argue: ‘While doing experience sharing, photos are indeed the most popular and convenient media we use today to translate daily happenings and tell life stories’. Not surprisingly, the idea of sharing photographs as a community-based social activity is firmly rooted in analogue practices of photography. Until the 1990s, sharing laminated pictures (and stories) was indeed a shared social experience conducted commonly within the social circles of family and friends. Moving back to Flickr, the formation of groups, for instance, is a prominent feature of it. Its website’s overall design strongly favours group activity as we can read on its starting page: ‘Groups are a fabulous way to share content and conversation, either privately or with the world. Believe us when we say there’s probably a group for everyone, but if you can’t find one you like, feel free to start your own’. Flickr groups can either be public (open to all), semi-public (invite only) or completely private, and every group is a discussion board for talking with members. Groups offer space for many-to-many contacts, and almost half of all Flickr Pro users participate in at least one group. 


Slide 5 

Memories can connect people through images. Ever since Flickr’s popularity as a photo sharing website exploded in 2006, its function as a picture repository as well as a site for community building has not gone unnoticed by so-called ‘memory institutions’: archives, libraries and museums. The major role of memory institutions is to ‘link the past with the present’ and to ‘interpret and contextualize cultural heritage for it to become meaningful to people in their present lives’ (Manzuch, 2009: 3) This points out, memory is not the same as heritage: the distinctive feature of a memory institution is not holding a cultural heritage collection, ‘but also performing activities that transform heritage into a cultural intermediary of memory’. Digitization projects are regarded as effective tools for engaging users in (the building of) collective memory and as facilitators of cultural heritage collections. Active participants in photographic communities, many of whom are Flickr users, are increasingly mobilized to contribute to emerging online heritage services such as the European Library, the World Digital Library or the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress selected Flickr Commons as a (non-commercial) venue for sharing historical photographs from their collections with a large number of global users. In essence, the adjective ‘connective’ rather than ‘collective’ much better describes the memory function of photo sharing sites. It is not just the images that configure a communal view of the past, but the connective work performed on the basis of uploaded data. Historians should be careful to conceptualize digital platforms such as Flickr as archives, because their deployment and interpreta- tion is ultimately contingent upon the connective quality of its mediators, whether human or non- human. In the culture of connectivity, photo sharing sites are practices of memory mediated by social and technical protocols (Bowker, 2008; Galloway, 2004). 


Erica Scourti Slide 

Athens-born, London-based artist Erica Scourti, who works with the mediation of personal experience through networked space, using video, writing and performance, has begun to ask some pertinent questions: How can a creative individual be recognised as unique, when Instagram has made everyone’s photographs look the same? What value has a snapshot once it’s uploaded and absorbed into a larger ‘cloud’ of image data? In one of her projects Scourti began uploading some of her personal archive of scanned photographs, letters, flyers and general ephemera to Google’s reverse image search engine, to see what it would throw back at her. Using pattern recognition algorithms, Google matched her images with those of other users, with which they shared a similar visual footprint. Soon, Scourti began to be bombarded with insights into other people’s lives, becoming privy to occasions and events, purportedly just like her own. Scourti set up a tumblr page, similarselves, and began to contact the ‘owners’ of the other images, thus setting up a kind of creative exchange, inviting these people to tag their images with words and phrases, describing, and, in one fell swoop, both personalising and generalising their photographs. n Scourti Exhibition called So Like You which was shown at the University of Brighton last year displays some of the curious connections that Google made. A looped video shows a reel of images, overlaid with tags, ranging from the standard ‘sexy’, to the could-be-anyone ‘freckles’, to the specifically non-specific ‘coach to Amsterdam’ and ‘freedom’ to the completely random ‘face melt’ and ‘kahlua cornflakes’. The choice of video as exhibiting medium reinforces the concept of modern digital media, while the slow speed at which the images appear and fade away, square by square, is oddly slow and calming – the antithesis to the mad rush of social media. Information is given in the top left-hand corner, including: title, description, camera type and date taken. This gives the work a scientific feel, as if everything is being logged in an experiment. This is an experiment, but the experiment is going on all around us, every minute of every day, with us all as guinea pigs, blithely unawares. Hence, an ubiquitous related project