W9: Social imaging and what strangers know about you
If you’re a 90’s kid, like me, you may remember trying all too aggressively to fit your large disposable or digital camera in your backpack ready for school camps and shopping trips. Trust me – the struggle was real. But oh, how times have changed.
Now, new innovations have enabled these cameras to be integrated into our beloved smartphones to a point where at times, they can be considered an extension of our limbs – always within an arm’s ready and ready for any moment to be captured. Where we would usually only share with close friends weeks later, we now share instantly with the world. Whoever is interested can view these photographs just by searching your name if they so desire. We are now visual beings, and quite frankly; no longer make our first impressions in person. I know, it’s scary.
The way that we capture – or remember – the moments in our lives, how we share these and who we share these to has been revolutionised. Personal photography is now a part of our culture. But, how does this influences our digital footprint, or change what strangers can know about us before they even know our name? Turns out – a lot.
Being ‘tagged’ in a photograph is an ubiquitous affordance of social media, and one which has enabled connectivity and interaction among users – we tag businesses, locations, other users, and can check into locations, events, and even our own home with a detailed map given to anybody who wishes to view it. Clearly, it’s a crafty innovation, however it also makes us scarily searchable via images – which is particularly problematic when tagging is made publicly visible through social media channels without ones consent, with young people reportedly expressing concern and degrees of anxiety when considering their own visual landscapes among social media channels (Hand, 2012, p. 175).
‘Tagging is thus both a way of finding and being found’ – Swinburne Online, 2018.
Network visuality is a term used to describe the way images have become vital to the formation and maintenance of our digital communication (Swinburne, 2018), and selfie culture is a term used to describe the notion of self-portraits typically taken in a fashion which plays on particular representational desires (not that I really need to explain that one). Both are prominent concepts in the rise of social imaging, and something I touch on in an earlier blog post here.
Ever wondered how easy it is for strangers to know more about you, based solely on the information and images you post on social media? Take a look at this confronting social experiment:
Clearly, social imaging leaves little privacy.
How would you feel if you were approached by a stranger who knew your dog’s name, the colour of your bedroom walls, or even the type of TV you purchased over the weekend? Would you reconsider the images you post online after watching this?
References
Hand, M 2012, Ubiquitous Photography, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Swinburne Online, 2018, ‘9.2 Ubiquitous photography’, MDA20009: Digital Communities, Swinburne Online, viewed 16 May 2018, Link
Vale, J, 2013, Social Media Experiment (online video), YouTube, November 2018, viewed 16 May 2018, Link
Oh, that video totally freaked me out! I’m so glad I’m not the type of person who is obsessed with tagging or checking in everywhere they go! I’m also fortunate to be old enough to have done all my stupid stuff before the age of social media. In order to save my self from embarrassment at my 21st, all I had to do was hide all the embarrassing photos, no way kids can do that as once you post a photo online it could end up anywhere!
