Six: Conclusions
Update (8/7/08): adding this pic to “This photo is me” group. Well, this is a self portrait, and already appropriately titled “This is me”. No make up, nothing fancy, just how I usually look (granted, this was on a good hair day), “what you see is what you get” etc. And I guess what makes this pic *me* is that I was taking it for someone I love, I was thinking about him, with him there is no pretenses, I’m just me, and I’m happy about who I am. Carol
The objective of this essay was to illustrate that the practices of visual representation of the self are changing with development of recent technologies and that this phenomena is grounded in social theory of the self enough to be a legitimate and important area of research. I was aiming to show that digital photography introduces to everyday life new means of self-representation that were previously exclusively reserved for artists (or craftsmen, depending on what one believes in). I outlined the arguments made by Bauman and Mead (among others) to illustrate how relevant this new practice is to the issues of the self and thus that sociology needs to acknowledge that it is set to become an integral part of life of an individual. Through the availability of new tools to produce (digital photographs) and publish (the Internet) individuals gain more access to the visual culture. They will also access it from the new standpoint, not only as spectators (one of major revolutions in visual cultures was brought about by the introduction of television) but also as participants. Early famous photographs, like Alfred Stieglitz’s “Fifth Avenue, Winter” (1892) might have been praised for illustration the everyday life of “normal” people, but they were necessarily perceived in terms of works of art. By the 1920s, Susan Sontag observes, the photographer had become a modern hero (Sontag S, 2005: 69). This is no longer the case in as much as photograph can be a holiday snapshot and thus much more an object of everyday practice, than a work of art. Every one can be a photographer, though arguably not an artist, in the sense that they participate in production of photographs.
New means of distribution of photographic work has also far fetched consequences. Internet services devote to publishing of this work are providing every one with means of reaching an audience of previously inexperienced scale. In practical terms this means shifting photographic practice from the realm of private or even intimate to the realm of exposition to general audiences that the author needn’t necessarily know. This will cause a change in how an individual approaches their photographs; it is a different matter to visually represent ourselves to people we know personally and to the endless unknown of the Internet. The choice we can make in terms of what photographs are published on-line might give an individual an illusion of control over the image of their self that is projected to the outside world, but this form of distribution also means that an image can be taken away from its author and published independently in context the author has no control over.
Another aspect of this new phenomenon is the significance of means by which photography allows as to project this image of ourselves. As I mentioned in the outline of Mead’s argument he state that one needs to look at themselves from the outside of themselves to become an independent subject. In these terms popular digital photography provides us with a way of achieving this external gaze at our own individuality in the context of the group. In this sense we gain another dimension to what Erving Goffman identified as an intrinsically actor-like role of individual in society (Goffman E, 1969). Socially we are always acting certain role – and we adjust our behaviour as actors to the changing reality of who is watching us. In any situation “the individual will have to act so that he intentionally or unintentionally expresses himself, and the others will in return have to be impressed in some way by him” (Goffman E, 1969: 2). What is a completely new experience for a “normal” member of society is being exposed to an abstract audience of the World Wide Web – audience that they can identify very vaguely if at all. This new experience, especially that it takes place in the context of important practice of self-representation, will have to become of increasing importance to the social sciences.
We can distribute this vision of ourselves among other people which causes a situation of what could be called a reverse panopticon – instead of few watching over many, it is individuality of one that is exposed to the eyes of the group. Additionally through the Internet photographic services an ongoing conversation is enabled. Services like Flickr allow the users to “comment” on each other’s photographs. And by this ongoing conversation such services become social institutions in their own rights – with a complex web of social connections, own codes of conduct, own law enforcement etc. Another consequence of the ongoing conversation is that the individual is constantly provided with feedback in regards to how they are perceived by their audience. This can potentially be very important to the constitution of the self since as I mentioned before it takes place through the discourse of symbolic language. And photographic representation has another dimension to its symbolic status in as much that it operates with signs of visual nature. Earlier in the essay I made an argument that potential differences in the understanding of symbolic meanings can pose a serious problems to the individual’s conduct. In this sense feedback in regards to visual representation is also a form of social negotiation of shared meaning. Internet enables this negotiation to take place between groups who are not necessarily spatially or culturally close to one another.
Tags: internet, photography, research, sociology
final of the “This photo is me” research: http://tinyurl.com/7f8vob