Collocated photo sharing, story-telling, and the performance of self

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2009.09.003Get rights and content

Abstract

This article reports empirical findings from four inter-related studies, with an emphasis on collocated sharing. Collocated sharing remains important, using both traditional and emerging image-related technologies. Co-present viewing is a dynamic, improvisational construction of a contingent, situated interaction between story-teller and audience. The concept of performance, as articulated differently by Erving Goffman and Judith Butler, is useful understand the enduring importance of co-present sharing of photos and the importance of oral narratives around images in enacting identity and relationships. Finally, we suggest some implications for both HCI research and the design of image-related technologies.

Introduction

One of the most successful consumer technologies of the twentieth century was the film camera. Recent years have seen massive changes in personal photography, including the transition from film to digital; the introduction of small, high-quality digital cameras, and cameraphones; and easy display and sharing of digital images, not only with intimates but posted online to the world at large.1

This paper is primarily concerned with collocated sharing, specifically of personal photos, that is, images made by non-professionals, for themselves and intimates, acquaintances, and even strangers. While computer networking has enabled great advances in photo sharing at a distance, collocated sharing remains important. And, I argue in this article, will remain so.

The approach taken here is rooted largely in science and technology studies (STS). STS approaches technologies as sociotechnical systems: heterogeneous networks of culturally and historically situated artifacts, technologies, practices, people, and understandings. Technology “design” is a process of heterogeneous engineering of these components (Law, 2001), and not necessarily by designers. Meanings are created by users as they match the possibilities of the technology to their ongoing and emerging goals, experiences, and activities. An artifact's design constrains these interpretations, especially over the short term. But, as Suchman et al. (2002) put it:

Technologies appear in these investigations as socio-material apparatuses that align themselves into more and less coherent and durable forms…in ongoing practices of assembly, demonstration, and performance. The shift from an analysis in terms of form and function to a performative account, moreover, carries with it an orientation to the multiplicity of technoscience objects. (Suchman et al., 2002; pp. 163–164).

To design useful photo-related, image-related technologies, we need to understand personal photography as an enduring but malleable assemblage of technologies, practices, intentions, and understandings embedded in people's daily lives. We need to support both on-going and emerging photographic practices. Most of all, we must not “break” a technology that is so widely used and loved, but, if possible, enhance users’ experience.

This article reports empirical findings from four inter-related studies, with an emphasis on collocated sharing. We found that collocated sharing remains important in a digitally-mediated, distributed world. Both traditional and emerging image-related technologies are being used in collocated sharing. Co-present viewing is a dynamic, improvisational construction of a contingent, situated interaction between story-teller and audience.

In asking why collocated sharing is practiced regularly and whether it will continue to be, in a networked, distributed world, I argue that the concept of performance, as articulated in somewhat different ways by Erving Goffman and Judith Butler, can help us to understand the co-present sharing of photos and its role in enacting identity and relationships. Finally, I suggest some implications for both HCI research and the design of image-related technologies.

Section snippets

Related research

Research on personal photography and its associated practices is spread across several fields, including visual sociology, visual anthropology, and visual studies, as well as HCI. The existing empirical research, however, must be treated with caution. Personal photography is a culturally and socially situated activity. For example, Bourdieu and Bourdieu (2004) say of the French peasants in the 1960s that hanging family photos in the more public parts of house, a common practice among our

The present study

This paper draws on findings from four related interview-based investigations into personal photography, part of our larger on-going research program about social media, personal photography, and new media (Davis et al., 2005; Van House et al. 2004, Van House, 2006a, Van House, 2006b, Van House, 2007; Van House et al., 2005; Ames et al., 2009). In addition, this author and various co-researchers over about 5 years were participant observers and engaged in less formal observation of photographic

Findings

First we talk about image-making generally; then we organize our empirical observations by the medium of sharing with an emphasis on collocated viewing and the changes associated with digital technologies.

Discussion: collocated sharing

In keeping with our emphasis on user-constructed meanings and goals, in this part of the paper we discuss some possible reasons for the importance of collocated sharing and its continuing popularity, and how it may tie into people's enduring, on-going, practices and goals.

Implications

Personal photography and collocated photo sharing are likely to remain important in people's daily lives. Personal photos are deeply implicated in memory, identity, and relationships. The synchronous, situated narrative constructed in the moment, in conjunction with the audience, is an important social practice by which images, audience, and subject come together for both individual and group self-understanding and relationships. Performance of the individual and the group—in both Goffman's and

Acknowledgements

My thanks to my former colleague Marc Davis, who got me started on this research and helped in the early stages; Morgan Ames, Mirjana Spasojevic, and Mor Naaman, who were part of the Zonetag research; and the various student researchers who were part of this work over time, especially Vlad Kaplun.

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