Visually connected to my digital network and to the nature of my existence
(Looker 2016)
Digital photo and video sharing applications such as Instagram, Snapchat and Youtube offer much more than a mechanism with which to capture and distribute ‘personal ephemera’ (Lange 2009, p. 74). Like the painters of the Impressionist movement it has provided a blank canvas and a new art form, characterised by an ordinariness of subject matter, the momentary nature of human perception and the transient qualities of the everyday experience. I am now equipped to express the impulsive and trivial ‘moments in life’ that juxtapose the more readily recorded ‘celebrations and rites of passage’ (Lange 2009, p. 74).
For me my contribution to Instagram and Snapchat is more than a collection of photographs or fleeting videos. They are a unique and personalised expression of experience, a ‘digital self-representation in a networked age’ (Vivienne & Burgess 2013, p. 284). As though adorning the walls of The National Gallery, social media platforms have allowed me to reflect on and curate a broader narrative of ‘artefacts’ that illustrate and exhibit my participation in the world as I see it (Hogan 2010, pp. 381-382).
The depiction of self has been a construct of ‘visual communication’ throughout history that has defined understandings of community and culture (Ibrahim 2015, p. 42). In its personification of identity it offers profound opportunities to peer into the similar and different, the innermost and the impersonal. Consequentially the revolutions in personal and social imaging that have erupted alongside developments in mobile camera technology and digitally mediated experiences have cultivated an environment where representations of ‘everyday life’ form a central element of our ‘identity construction, communication and social connection’ (Ibrahim 2015, p. 43).
Today, the digital photograph has evolved as a dominant channel of communication between ‘socially networked individuals’, participating across social media platforms to capture, document and broadcast ‘a visual record’ of the experience of self (Iqani & Schroeder 2015, p. 409). In this sense images function akin to ‘spoken language’ as the photos and videos I share capture a ‘new currency in social interaction’, disseminating between users and traversing networked communities to construct and affirm my connectedness (Van Dijck 2008, p. 62).
Visual communities and social imaging are shaping ‘the architecture’ of a modern public sphere, through a dynamic mediation of our digitally enhanced experiences (Papacharissi 2013, p. 51). This fervent interaction with visually communicative social media is underlining a contemporary culture that is yearning for ‘self-promotion and personalised communication’ (Iqani & Schroeder 2015, p. 405). Being ‘visible’ in away that is for the most part managed and directed by myself is significant, not simply for its offer of control over my individual perspective or frame of reference, but also because it prompts greater consideration of the discourse surrounding digital ‘citizenship’ and how it might be articulated across the more visual expanses of the social media landscape (Iqani & Schroeder 2015, p. 412). The images and video I contribute to my varying social media accounts assist me in ‘narrating’ and also drawing sense from my experience, they are used to connect me and those within my digital network to the nature of my existence. ‘With snapshots we become our own historians, and through them we proclaim and affirm our existence’ (Iqani & Schroeder 2015, p. 408).
References:
Hogan, B 2010, ‘The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online’, Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 377-386.
Ibrahim, Y 2015, ‘Instagramming life: banal imaging and the poetics of the everyday’, Journal of Media Practice, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 42-54.
Iqani, M & Schroeder, JE 2015, ‘#selfie: digital self-portraits as commodity form and consumption practice’, Consumption Markets and Culture, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 405-415.
Lange, P 2009, ‘Videos of Affinity on YouTube’, in P, Snickars & P, Vonderau (eds), The YouTube Reader, National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, pp. 70-88.
Looker, E 2016, ‘Introspective: portrait of Rohan’ [image], 26 March, Melbourne.
Papacharissi, Z 2013, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age, Oxford: Wiley, ProQuest Ebook Central.
Van Dijck, J 2008, ‘Digital photography: communication, identity, memory’, Visual Communication, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 57-76.
Vivienne, S & Burgess, J 2013, ‘The Remediation of the Personal Photograph’, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 279-98.
