Instant analysis: Mobile photography as a research method (original) (raw)
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Contemporary society is overwhelmed with images. Personal photography has in recent decades gone through a considerable change in terms of practice and technology. Traditional forms of production, dissemination and presentation are being uprooted and replaced by new ones. One cause for this change is the emergence of new technologies such as Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) and Social Network Sites (SNS). These technologies are collapsing the traditional temporal and spatial aspects of personal photography. These current technologies and practices have a distinct relationship with postmodernity. This research is interested in the epistemological implications of these changes. This research utilized a critical and historical examination of photography theory and photography history. I have used
Instagram at the museum: Communicating the museum experience through social photo sharing
Proceedings of CHI 2013, 2013
The everyday use of smartphones with high quality built-in cameras has lead to an increase in museum visitors’ use of these devices to document and share their museum experi- ences. In this paper, we investigate how one particular pho- to sharing application, Instagram, is used to communicate visitors’ experiences while visiting a museum of natural history. Based on an analysis of 222 instagrams created in the museum, as well as 14 interviews with the visitors who created them, we unpack the compositional resources and concerns contributing to the creation of instagrams in this particular context. By re-categorizing and re-configuring the museum environment, instagrammers work to construct their own narratives from their visits. These findings are then used to discuss what emerging multimedia practices imply for the visitors’ engagement with and documentation of museum exhibits. Drawing upon these practices, we sug- gest ways to reconnect the online social media dialogue with the museum site.
'It's Just Pictures': The Death of Social Photography as we Know it
Vol. 11 No. 1 (2024): Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Social Media - ECSM 2024, 2024
The widespread adoption of smartphones and increased use of social media has changed how people document and share their everyday lives. As social media has evolved over the last decade, so has social photography practice. In this short paper, we discuss this evolution in relation to our work in progress within an ongoing longitudinal qualitative study spanning over ten years. In this project, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with the same group of informants in 2012, 2017 and 2022. This methodological approach has allowed us to examine how social media users reflect on experience, use and practice. In this paper, we highlight how during this last decade there has been a shift in how people document and share their everyday life in social media. More than ever before, social media users of today are able to document and share snapshots of everyday life, keeping friends and memories close and easy to access. However, in the early days of social media, people were more active in terms of their own production of content and posting of pictures, while today, they share less new material. From our analysis, we discuss how our informants report a shift in how they experience social photography, from being a process of editing and sharing photos intensely, to a more passive approach where they describe taking a lot of images, but not sharing them on social media to the same extent as they did before. Based on one representative example from our empirical material, we discuss the implications of the development of social media platforms over this past decade, and how the possibility to edit and share with others 'in the moment' has transformed into something less social over these years. We show how social media photography has evolved from being a practice of editing and sharing memorable content, to being less interactive, and instead involving more individual consumption and reflection, as well as sharing photographs in smaller circles. While the claim that social photography is 'dead' is rather bold, we do believe that there is a trend towards a less social and more individual engagement in social media photography.
Instagram : The New Environment of Art and Creative Public Pedagogy Nowadays
Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Arts, Language and Culture (ICALC 2018), 2019
The technology developments nowadays continue to grow, which all have the right to become agents in dissemination of new knowledge. The Instagram has became an art space in the new pedagogical environment through public space. The shared content in the Instagram always rises rapid interaction. The form of its interaction are appreciation through its comments, discussion or "like". These interactions measure a person's thinking ability in improving visual literacy knowledge through social media. Users view the importance of Instagram as a teacher, parents who are believed to be the primary source to gain new knowledge. This was based on the tendency of easy interaction between Instagram user. This study aimed to explain the contribution of Instagram as a environment of public pedagogy that has an impact on visual literacy skills. The results showed that visual literacy believes that the presence of images from the world of Instagram has contributed to the need for creative imagination and critical thinking literacy, self-satisfaction, and education. Instagram as a new learning world collaborates into conventional classes used as a medium of expression through the exhibition of student creations. Diversity of opinion shows that digital technology nowadays produces major changes in the way people perceive and engage with the cultural environment.
#artoninstagram: Engaging with Art in the Era of the Selfie
International Journal of Market Research, 2020
This study aims to understand how people engage with art in the era of selfies, digital devices and social media. It examines the audience experience of an art exhibition, where visitors are encouraged to use social media to share their art experience, in order to understand how such an approach might change the nature of visitor engagement with art. Arguably, selfies taken in the art space enrich the visitor’s experience and engagement with art, and function as co-creational, empowering and authentic marketing tools for museums. Data for this research were collected through non-participant observation (ethnography) and netnography at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne Australia. The results show that rather than promoting disengagement from the art piece, selfies in the art space become “networked material-discursive entanglements” (Warfield, 2016: 1) empowering art consumers to co-create value and arts organizations to reduce their distance from consumers and reproduce the iconic authenticity of the artwork in the virtual space. The paper contributes to selfie theory by overcoming the traditional view of selfies as manifestation of narcissistic self-expression. Instead, it promotes an interpretation of selfies as an empowering and democratizing means used by art consumers to develop narratives and identity projects in a context such as the museum where traditionally the development of the narrative is apanage of an elite. A further contribution provided by this research stems from the identification of clusters of visitors (i.e., reality escapers, art lovers, photoholics and selfie lovers), placed on a continuum of value co-creation, which arts administrators need to be conscious of as they enter a more dynamic era of art consumption. By outlining managerial implications, this study provides an initial reflection on how arts managers can navigate the emerging era of the selfie in the museum context.
Art of the Masses: From Kodak Brownie to Instagram
Networking Knowledge, special issue Be Your Selfie: Identity, Aesthetics and Power in Digital Self-Representation, 2015
In history of photography, new technological developments often provide a basis for new forms of imagery. These, in turn, are followed by new ways of theorizing the photographic image. For example, the cheapness and ease of use of the Kodak Brownie camera around 1900 gave rise to a massive movement of amateur photography, introduced the snapshot, and established a tradition of family photograph albums. Similarly, around 2010 we saw a rise in popularity of a new kind of image-making, image-sharing, and image-viewing device, which I propose to call the networked camera. This networked camera is a curious hybrid consisting of a smartphone with a built-in camera, wireless internet connection, and online image-sharing platforms and other social media. The availability of such devices have provided the technological basis for the formation of a new sub-genre of amateur photography – selfie. Selfie continues the tradition of photographic self-portraiture yet at the same time presents us with a radically new type of image that demands equally new ways of analyzing it. Arguments put forward in this article are grounded in research project Selfiecity (2013-2014) led by Lev Manovich and his research lab Software Studies Initiative. This project was based on a dataset of 3,200 selfies posted to Instagram during one week from five global cities: New York, Moscow, Berlin, Sao Paulo, and Bangkok. Research methods included computational analysis (such as software-driven face recognition and use of custom-made data visualization tools) as well as formal and content analysis of each individual image. The article reveals some of the inherent complexities of understanding selfie that the methods and findings of Selfiecity have helped to articulate. Seeking for valid methods of theorizing and contextualizing selfie, the article attempts to combine insights from the perspectives of history of photography and art history, digital humanities, and software studies.
Instagram is one of the world’s most popular social media applications. For art galleries it is an important tool for promotion, marketing, interaction, participation and the enhancing of the visitor experience. For arts educators it is an opportunity to broaden the participation of people wanting to learn through art, and to consider how Instagram may contribute to an art gallery based learning program. There is limited research about the use of Instagram by visitors to an art gallery and the role it plays in their experience. This article is drawn from a research study into the use of Instagram by visitors to the Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (14 October 2017 – 4 February 2018). The research project, which was informed by spatial theory, found that the use of Instagram at the gallery engaged visitors in a manner that transcended the physical space and extended their aesthetic experience. This finding is significant for arts educators seeking to engage students through social media during visits to art exhibitions.