One: Introduction
This photo was taken at a party. It wasn’t actually posed for. I can tell because I’m smiling for real. It’s very me. At a party. A bit scruffy. Happy. I have a thing for pretentious sunglasses and hats, but unfortunately this is only one of them….
Rhianna
One of the most popular pictures sharing websites, Flickr, was originally developed as a communication tool for an online gaming community. Its early versions were focused around a chat option and real-time photo exchange options and its main aim was to allow users to collect photographs found around the web easily. Over the first year of Flickr’s rapid evolution – in Internet terms one year is indeed a long time – this focus shifted towards allowing users to easily upload, exhibit and organise their own photographs. What does the service do now? “Flickr helps you organize that huge mass of photos you have and offers a way for you and your friends and family to tell stories about them.“ (Flickr.com, 2008)
Obviously Flickr is not the only service that allows users to exchange photographs and pictures in digital format (other services include: Share on Ovi, Webshot, Photobucket, Smugmug, Imageshack). The reason why I am recalling history of its evolution is that I believe it is symptomatic of the phenomenon that is to be the topic of this essay: the need of self representation via digital imaginery. Evolution of technologies influences social practices greatly (and more so with every day), but I believe the new social needs equally push development of technologies in certain directions. Increase in availability of digital photography and ways of exhibiting the pictures to big audiences are changing the artistic and cultural landscape as well as practices of every day life. As the so called social networking services begin to incorporate and even focus more and more around visual representation, I decided to ask: what is the sociological significance of the new forms of visual self-representation? How does this relate to the current theoretical approach to the relations between the self and photography? In the age of Bauman’s “liquid modernity” is more and more common photographic practice an attempt at creating a narrative for that difficult to grasp self?
The phenomenon that I would like to be the focus of this dissertation is difficult to describe in terms of linear cause and effect connection. It could probably most accurately be mapped with a “cloud“ of terms – one of Internet‘s favourite ways of visualising data. However as any text demands a comprehensive linear construction I propose to guide the reader through my critical examination of the said topic in the following order of related issues: explanation of the theoretical framework to relate to the concept of the self, mainly the theories of Zygmunt Bauman, moving on to how the self relates to the social group and process of social change (and vice versus), articulated by Gorge Mead. Through Meads theory it can be explained how this issue becomes the question of everyday practices and thus – via articulations of Michael Foucault and Judith Butler – of power and performativity. Foucault’s concept of power is closely related to the issue of my method and, as this is a theoretical dissertation, how theory becomes a sort of method as well.
