From my own experience, I've watched the photo sharing application of Facebook change from good to questionable. When we were high school, and Facebook was brand new, photo albums were slow to upload and could only contain 60 pictures maximum. Most people my age didn't have their own digital cameras, so pictures were mostly limited to special events and vacations, similar to photographs in the past. Eventually, picture messaging became common, and mobile uploading began. With mobile uploads, people could document instantaneous moments whenever their cell phone was handy. Album limits were removed, and everyday events became public domain.
With these changes, it became as though events had to be photographed as evidence that you were there. If there are pictures of an event that you attended, and you weren’t tagged in any photographs, you might as well not have gone. A photographical timeline of high school and college began to emerge for all of your Facebook friends to peruse, as a glimpse into not only the special events in one’s life, but also the personal moments captured by mobile uploads.
This is something that is touched on in the article; the idea that photographs are evidence. The influence of Facebook has taken this one step further, that the pictures are an integral part of an event, and there is this visual log of everyone’s activities. Social networking sites have increasingly adapted this mobile uploading feature as it has become more widely used, through photo tweets and programs such as Instagram. There are upsides to this way of social networking as well; in the way that photographs can show actual moments instead of simply describing them, we can update our friends without words, giving them actual glimpses into our activities through photographs that we choose to share.
Really great post. It really is amazing how much facebook has evolved in such a short time, and i had never really stop to think that what had changed the most was the photographic aspect from it. Sometimes when I look at my albums I do laugh at the first ones because like you said they could only have 60 pictures and it took forever to upload. Because of this it really had to be an album that was worth it, that is why those few first albums had just a bunch of random pictures. As you say now it has become some sort of a ritual: you go out= album, you go on a trip=album, you have an event=album, you are bored and have a mac with photobooth= annoying album. And with mobile uploads even more, although I cannot lie that some of the best moments have been forever immortalized by this feature.
ReplyDeleteIt made me laugh that you said that if you had an event and you do not appear on a picture it is as if you were not there, because just the other day I had a reunion from high school and as I looked at the album today I did not appear in one single photograph. I felt awful, as if for some reason I needed reassurance (evidence) that I was a part of it.
This 'evolution' that facebook has had in a way made it about no longer sharing your pictures but about recording your life and being able to relive it again whenever you feel like looking through your 2000 tagged photos.