Digital Images and Photo-Sharing
„In Flickr, we find an altered temporal relationship to the everyday image, a leveling of the hierarchy between professional and amateur, a unique sense of a community of viewers/producers, as well as a differing relationship to the collection, display, categorization, and distribution of the digital image. Instead of evoking loss, preservation, and death, users and viewers are encouraged to establish a connection with the image that is simultaneously fleeting and a building block of a biographical or social narrative. While these sites build a collection, they also privilege the immediacy of the image and acknowledge the inability of photography to hold onto time even as it provides avenues for nostalgia and memory. In addition, on the photo sites at least, the everyday communal aesthetic that has been constructed is one that privileges the small, the mundane, the urban, and the industrial. While digital photography has not revolutionized photography or led to a loss of the authenticity of an image as predicted early on, it has significantly altered our relationship to the practice of photography (when coupled with social networking software), as well as our expectations for and interactions with the image and an everyday aesthetic.“
Murray, Susan (2008): Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics. In: Journal of Visual Culture 7 (2), 147-163 (p. 161)
