Tag Archives: photos

Oct
11
2012

a life in photos and logging off

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I’ve been waiting to read more about what our classmate Kevin so eloquently described as “collapse of context” in our social media identities. I think for the majority of us that joined Facebook in the .edu era, this is especially true. There were already two or three years’ worth of college photos of us on our Facebook profiles when we entered the job market and worse, our mothers joined the network. Gilpin hits the nail on the head in the first two pages when she describes us having to construct an identity on these sites that is appropriate for a variety of groups (2012). I’m an integrated (work me, school me, family me, professional me) personification of myself online that has evolved over time into less of a true representation of myself than any real interaction with me in person. However, that is not to say that anything I put up is insincere. Just as those who participated in the Twitter study from this article, the social media content I produce is not “wholly representative” of me (Gilpin, 2012).

Interestingly enough, the photos of me on Facebook could tell a fairly accurate chronological story of the highlights of my life over the last six to seven years. I’ve always been someone that keeps a lot of pictures, but the widespread acquisition of point and shoot photos via the mobile phone have taken it to a new level. As Mendelson and Papcharissi bring up in their article, taking pictures of an event has been integrated in the experience of the actual event (2012). They also state via Barthes and Jacobs (1981) that photos provide proof of an experience (Mendelson and Papcharissi , 2012). I wonder if this will have a long term effect on the way millennials and the generations after recall memories. Will they be able to recall events as clearly as older generations without the cue of photos? The other element mentioned in the article that really struck me was the “moving map” concept. Our lives are somewhat documented through these public and shared photos so for ourselves and for others it become an ever growing representation of chronological events of our lives. Mine only moves forward from age 20 or so. What ramifications, if any, will this have for those that have been logged in since adolescence? Or worse, those whose parents have been posting pictures online of them since birth. Will their bosses eventually have access to middle school dance photographs due to the magic of “tagging”? Talk about collapse of context.

I really think Danah Boyd and I could be friends, at least until we had argument that could only be settled by Wikipedia. In her article Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle, she often dismisses the assumptions of social media skeptics. She argues that those who take advantage of the platform of social media are not are not the exhibitionists that some assume them to be, but are in fact simply “taking advantage of the affordances of these technologies to connect with others in a way that they feel is appropriate” (Boyd, 2012). However, I do think that social media has given an outlet those who were either already predisposed for exhibition or has awaken a latent need in others. I would say that only about 10% of my online network take advantage of the share button more than once a month, but those 10% seem deafening at times. Admittedly, I have complete control over what I’m exposed to online, and I choose not to “un-follow” those who post more than I want to know or are posting opinions I don’t share. That says more about me than anything, and I suspect others currently using their Facebook account to watch more than post are the same. They may be sharing in a way “they feel is appropriate” as Boyd states, but not everyone is going to share that opinion (2012). However, those who disapprove are largely going to be those not in the millennial generation, and older generations thinking everything is going to you-know-where because of the kids is nothing new. Boyd is correct that we all need to find a balance in this new world of 24 hour connectedness, which is why I’m turning my phone off during dinner.

Oct
09
2012

“…while the outfits and locations change, the types of events documented and the nature of the poses do not.”

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boyd (2012) kicks off the discussion about identity and self-presentation with the idea that it’s no longer about being “on” or “off”; an individual may not always be on the Internet but increasingly, he or she is always connected to the network. This reminded me of our class discussions about how younger generations no longer think of using the Internet as going online because, really, they are always online. boyd mentions that “being always-on” works best when the people around you are always-on, and this makes sense, given the constant “need for connectedness” that younger generations seem to have. I appreciate her view that being always-on is not an addiction, but that technology offers humans new possibilities to understand and interact. Unfortunately, I feel that this desire to understand and interact is rooted in malice, in that many people are interested in connecting with others (a) to brag about themselves and/or (b) to compare themselves to and gossip about others. In my opinion, this is one of the daunting aspects of the publicness of exposing oneself online, and a good reason to manage one’s online identity accordingly.

Furthermore, it is increasingly apparent that professional and personal identities blur in electronically mediated environments (Andrejevic 2004; Luders 2008; Papacharissi 2009). As such, Papacharissi (2009) suggests that social networking sites represent a confluence of identity roles, spaces where users must adjust their behavior so as to make it appropriate for a variety of different situations and audiences. In other words, while social networking sites are meant to be a place to express oneself, users are starting to realize that there must be some restrictions on this expression, and that it is important to actively manage one’s personal brand or identity online. This was apparent in Gilpin’s (2010) findings that positive opinions are prevalent in professionals’ Twitter activity, which suggests that negative opinions are expressed offline or on a more “traditional new media” such as blogs.

Now, for college students, this does not seem to be the case. New media allow people to present various forms of themselves to others at a distance (Mendelson and Papacharissi 2010), which might be one reason why college students find social networking sites to be so attractive. Furthermore, young people have a wider range of opportunities for photographic self-representation due to the availability of cheap cameras (Tinkler 2008). While it is true that social norms impose limitations of what is acceptable to post on social networking sites, college students’ desires to share and present themselves seem to push those boundaries to the limits at times, as shown by the lack of effort to hide underage drinking and the racy comments that often accompany the photos. What never ceases to amaze me is that college students’ overabundance of photos usually capture the same types of activities over and over again, yet their desire to share the photos never seems to dwindle. As noted by the Mendelson and Papacharissi (2010), it would be interesting to follow a group of students as they photographically move through their college years and beyond, to see which photos are untagged or how their photo posting and commenting behavior changes. But as we’ve discussed all semester, once anything is on the Internet, it never really goes away…so in many cases, the damage is already done.