Social Networking and Sharing

Is it a good or bad thing?

Since social networking, the way we have shared and view our photographic images has changed dramatically.  It has shifted the focus from a print to a visual image which then may never be printed – just stored electronically and possibly forgotten about.

Reasons why we moved and focused more on sharing images via social networking may be because;

It’s cheaper.

It’s easier.

It’s more convenient/ so accessible.

However, because of this, people have become narcissistic and far more interested in themselves than ever before. As sharing on websites such as Flickr, Facebook and blogs is free and accessible to pretty much everybody. We can upload mounds and mounds of images due to the convenience of digital cameras these days.

Also, people have become almost obsessed with taking images of themselves.  Which is down to social networking. Using social networking, people can change the way people even portray themselves.

Take Jennifer Ringley for example:

Jennifer Ringley, of the JenniCam experiment.

JenniCAM - Last Week at Jenni's Place. 2012. JenniCAM - Last Week at Jenni's Place. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.arttech.ab.ca/pbrown/jenni/jenni.html. [Accessed 05 March 2012]

For seven years, Jennifer took images of herself on a webcam. At the time, webcams were new and this experiment was a first of its kind. It attracted a large audience – mainly strangers.  The images were just of herself, in day to day life. Mundane images really, but as people we have always been interested in other people’s lives – it’s almost like escapism from peoples own lives.

Which is a scary concept really. Putting images up of yourself available to anyone makes you a target and exposed to possibly stalkers. You can never know how safe you’re being online. – all because of internet personas being built up of images and online diaries. 

Another negative of online sharing is the privacy side of it. Many people are wary of uploading their photos or videos to a social networking site like Facebook is because they are concerned about retaining the copyright to their work. It is so easy to save and copy and image and pass it off as your own work.

Apart from the fact sharing images over social networking sites on the Internet is cheap, easy and accessible, I struggle to find any actual positives about it when thinking about all the negatives.

I personally prefer the old fashioned method in which families would print out images and store them in an album. Photographs used to be something that were special and enjoyable to share within friends and families. Now, it feels like the ‘specialness’ of it has gone as we take it for granted these days.