Category: flickr

Deuze in conversation with Bauman, plus Cosmopolitan Cultural Citizenship and Flickr

Mark Deuze has been thinking, writing, and exchanging ideas with Zygmunt Bauman about liquid modernity, ‘community’ and the Internet, and I’ve been following along with Mark as he works through his ideas. This is the latest Bauman quote, in context here:

The ‘community’ of internauts whose substitute recognition is sought does not require the chores of socializing and is thereby free from risk, that notorious and widely feared bane of the off-line battles of recognition.

Another revelation is the redundancy of the ‘Other’ in any role other than the token of endorsement and approval. In the internet game of identities, the ‘other’ (the addressee and sender of messages) is reduced to his/her hard core of the thoroughly manipulable instrument of self-confirmation, stripped of most or all unnecessary bits irrelevant to the task yet grudgingly and reluctantly tolerated in off-line interaction.

When you combine this with the theory of liquid modernity and the endless tyrannical amnesia of ‘the moment’, this seems to be an interesting restatement of the well-known problem of superficiality and benign indifference, both in ‘virtual’ communities and in the continuing fragmentation of the ‘public sphere’. These issues are highly relevant to my work on Flickr. Which reminds me (because everything I see or read comes back to my thesis at the moment) of Nick Stevenson’s more optimistic ideal of a cosmopolitan cultural citizenship, which I have begun to find very useful. And by the way, it is quite clear that there is very particular ideal of layered cosmopolitanism at work around sites of cultural participation like Flickr – just think about their newly minted mission statement, in which Ludicorp announced they want Flickr to be ‘The Eyes of the World’:

That can manifest itself as art, or using photos as a means of keeping in touch with friends and family, “personal publishing” or intimate, small group sharing. It includes “memory preservation” (the de facto understanding of what drives the photo industry), but it also includes the ephemera that keeps people related to each other: do you like my new haircut? should I buy these shoes? holy smokes – look what I saw on the way to work! It let’s you know who’s gone where with whom, what the vacation was like, how much the baby grew today, all as it’s happening.

And most dramatically, Flickr gives you a window into things that you might otherwise never see, from the perspective of people that you might otherwise never encounter.

CSAA Abstract

Following the more timely examples of the two Mels (here is one, and here is the other) I (somewhat belatedly) have just submitted an abstract for this year’s CSAA conference, which will be held in sunny Canberra. I had the idea months ago but couldn’t wrangle it into a pithy enough form until now, plus it had to be something I could plug in or pull directly out of my thesis, otherwise it would just be irresponsible given that I am supposed to be submitting not too long after the conference, which is in early December. Also, it’s reassuring to see that my suckiness at making up titles is still alive and well.

Snapshots in the City: The Flickr meetup as a site of cultural citizenship
Contemporary digital culture is increasingly characterised by the convergence of social networks, online communities, and public platforms for ‘user-generated’ content. One of the effects of this convergence is the remediation as public culture of everyday social practices of material and symbolic ‘vernacular creativity’. The photosharing network Flickr is a prominent manifestation of this trend – it represents an ‘architecture of participation’ within which thousands of users explore photographic practice at the same time as they negotiate and participate in the social networks in which their creative content circulates. Some members of the network also participate in local ‘meetups’ – offline photographic excursions and opportunities for socialising.

The most active participation in Flickr, then, is a convergence of ‘offline’ everyday life in a particular local context with ‘online’ participation in digital culture. This form of participation has transformative effects on both photography as creative practice and vernacular creativity as a means of cultural participation.

In this paper, I draw on a detailed discussion of the Brisbane Flickr Meetup group to explore the ways in which such participation can and does take the form of what, translating Habermas into the language of the cultural public sphere, we might term ‘episodic publics’ – the ephemeral and everyday spaces where cultural citizenship is practised.

flickr meetup

Yesterday I finally made it to my first Brisbane flickr meetup, which is part of my fieldwork but also a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. We met at the Regatta, hopped on the citycat and went downriver to the University of Queensland, where we wandered along the riverbank up to the construction site of the new Green Bridge, chatting about cameras (and ‘having an eye’ vs. technological mastery) and the life of the city and our jobs and hobbies.

More photos at the group photo pool

The cultural politics of flickr tags




This is from the preliminary stages of a little textual analysis experiment I’m thinking about designing. It’s to do with the way that ‘architectures of information’ invite particular forms of subjecthood, particular constellations of values, and particular kinds of participation, and those forms of participation in turn work to shape the architecture in their own image.

See also race, age, work, identity, ethnic and gender.

There are obvious limitations to which of these terms ‘make sense’ as flickr tags in the first place, and in what ways, but still, interesting results so far. ‘Identity’ and ‘work’ to my mind are the most interesting – and the least silly in terms of what we might reasonably expect users to tag their photos with.

And more deterministically, Truscello says: “architecture, whether it refers to buildings or databases, constructs subject positions through the spatialization of power.”

Anyway, what other forms of ‘clustery goodness’ should I try?

[update]: speaking of the construction of subject positions and the spatialization of power and GoogleZon/Silicon Valley values (and the vanity of following your own incoming search strings): earlier today this Google search string spat this post out as the top-most result. My apologies to the searcher, who stayed for precisely 0 seconds.

flickrtags


Last (but hopefully not best) sentence of the day:

The ‘most popular tags’ cloud is characterised by the convergence of the most predictable subjects of vernacular photography – places, family, birthdays, weddings – with muted versions of the structurating categories of capital ‘P’ photography – technology (canon, film, black&white) and genre (art, portrait).

Current thesis word count: 25,041


more video-sharing thingies

Online editing, rich ‘folksonomy’ and community-building features would seem to be essential components of whatever is going to be the ‘flickr of video’, i.e. the default destination for video ‘sharing’. (That is, if there will be such a thing – remembering the very specific circumstances of flickr’s emergence, which have a lot to do with the viral marketing and ingroup psychology of the A-list techbloggers).

In addition to YouTube, which is the most well known at the moment, and jumpcut, which I blogged about the other day, a couple others have floated into my field of vision lately: Eyespot has the ‘mix and share’ ethos right up front; also, I don’t know what is currently going on at motionbox, but wanted to check it out too. Any others I should know about?