Why do people post so many photos in Flickr?
25 November 2007 at 23:24 (Europe/London) in Think piecesHave you ever wondered why some people post thousands of pictures lacking any captioning into Flickr (or any other photo sharing service)? I have. For the sake of argument, I divide the users of Flickr roughly into three categories.
An occasional user shares images of a particular event. He or she may possess documentation of an important social gathering such as a wedding ceremony. The website is a tool to live up to social pressure to share the records of a collective experience considered to be a kind of joint property.
The second orientation is a conscious identity builder. These people share frequently but selectively. They add titles, descriptions, keywords, retouch pictures and organize them into sets to create narratives for generally unknown group of viewers. I belong to this group. The required editorial work takes a lot of time, but I personally have a firm belief that it pays off in terms of more appealing images and stories. These, sometimes painstaking, efforts are in sharp contrast with the third and maybe the most interesting orientation towards photo sharing.
The third group is made of those who constantly spill the complete contents of their memory cards into web unmediated by any selection, captioning or retouching practices. The obscure filenames generated by digital cameras end up as image titles possibly supplemented with some other automatically generated metadata. Flickr search with the term “DSC_” that is a filename prefix for Sony cameras returned 18 082 105 hits on 28 November 2007 0.44am BST. Just click the link to see how the number is growing. Update: on 31 January 3.41pm BST the number was 21 676 105. That is 3 594 000 photos in two months.
A friend belonging to this thid group once reasoned that he is counting on still-to-be-developed technologies to be able to make sense out these masses in the future. This may very well happen, but there is another way to make sense out this phenomenon that was before the age of the internet stuffed into shoeboxes and hidden into the closet.
Geoffrey C. Bowker (2005) points out in his insightful book on memory practices that the acts of recording and recalling a memory are two different events. “The act of taking a photograph is an act of conceptualizing the present: this is an important moment; this is how I see my brother; this is my friend”, writes Bowker (p. 15) and continues “I share the academic passion for photocopying and filing away articles, which I have no real intention of ever reading.” For sure, shoebox or website makes a big difference, but whether the photograph is actually ever retrieved once it has been recorded may not be as important as one might think at the first sight. However, just taking the picture is neither enough as it has to be archived somehow.
Bowker (p. 30) calls the current regime as the epoch of potential memory.Digital technologies redefine our capabilities to capture and store data, potential information, revolving around ourselves. But why do some people pick up these opportunities so eagerly? Why does this take place more and more in public?
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Bowker, Geoffrey C. (2005). Memory Practices in the Sciences. The MIT Press.
i confess. i spam my flickr account by sending there all the photos i take. for me it is even less than a “shoebox”: a “contact sheet” or storage for “negatives” (to use the terms of analog photography), including black photos from the bottom of my pocket that would never make it into anybodys shoebox.
however, it is not only about personal acts of storage/retrieval. i hardly ever use captions to describe my photos (just tags). nevertheless, i have a regular audience that every now and then notices something interesting in my photos, comments and initiates a conversation.. so it is not technology that helps me make sense of my photos, but other people. this then raises an interesting question about identity building/management: am i doing it or are others doing if for me if they are the ones selecting the photos we talk about?
what comes to Bowker’s distinction between storing and recalling, i think it is misleading or inaccurate, because there would not be one without the other. i also store articles into binders knowing that it is very unlikely i will ever read them. however, the distant possibility that i might read them is enough to motivate me to do it. It is about leaving the option open. Were storing and recalling truly separate acts, we would have people printing articles and immediately feeding them to a shredder.
Hi, thanks for thoughtful comment. You raise some interesting viewpoints into the practices of my third group. I would still argue that Bowker’s analytical distinction between storing and recalling maybe be helpful although as you say they may not be completely separable. While storing actually takes place, is it that the recalling is more imaginary act than something that actually happens? Would it make sense to study the relationship of actual storing and imagined recall?