Photo shopping

a snapshot on camera phone practices in an age of web 2.0

Larissa Hjorth

pp. 157-159

in: Larissa Hjorth (ed), Photo shopping, Knowledge, Technology & Policy 22 (3), 2009.

Abstract

Interwoven into the rise of mobile media and Web 2.0 has been the hype around user created content (UCC), the “producer” (Bruns 2005) and the democraticization of multimedia. In one way, the rise of mobile media parallels the rise of the webcam (Koskela 2004) by affording everyday users with the ability to document and edit their stories. However, the marriage between mobile media and Web 2.0 promises more—the portal to new arising forms of distribution such as MySpace, Xiaonei, Facebook, Cyworld mini-hompy, and YouTube. In this relationship, we are faced with a far from harmonious setting; if we are to understand anything about this phenomenon, then it is only through the negotiation of the local that we can fully understand the complexity of these emerging forms of community, creativity, and authorship in an age of full-time public intimacy (Berlant 1998). Camera phone practices amplify the local, highlighting the divergent ways in which public, private, and the personal are being...