Marion Misilim
December 9, 2002
Social Weather
Clay Shirky
A Look at Photographic Communities Online.
There has been a boom of photography in group activity online this year around
October. But there are communities that have been around longer. I’ve
chosen to look at some of the newer photo based communities to see how they
are pushing the use of photography as well as other older communities that use
photography. It would be interesting to look at some of the new groups in six
months to see if they last and to see if they have developed.
The photographic image has appeared in many different contexts. Photos have been hung on a wall, put into magazine and if you string a series of photographic images together you get a film. Each context has a different effect on the way we read the meaning of a photograph; similar to the way we get different meanings from an article, story, poem or play. You would hardly get any of those mixed up. Collectively we have seen the way words differ on the internet from hyperlinks on web pages to chat rooms. Some modes of communication work and other don’t. Since I have an interest in photographs, how they are used and technology, I’ve been looking for new ways photographs work in a digital medium. In this case I set out to find out whether photographs can replace words in social communication on a group level.
What I first thought about was the use of photographs in different mediums, and how and why they work. I will just quickly mention what I have noticed. But before I do, I’d like to mention is what I find wonderful about photos; you capture a slice of a moment in time and from that image, you derive meaning.
In a gallery or museum setting, the photograph not only conveys a meaning in and of itself, it is viewed in the context of other images on display. It is also an art object to be bought, sold, collected etc. Placing an image within the context of a photographic book transforms all the images together into one definitive object. The images relate to each other as a whole as well as page by page. There is a linear series of events, although the whole book may not be linear. Someone’s personal photo album reflects the story of someone’s life. Sometimes these albums are linear or thematic, based on someone’s life and family. In articles, the photograph works in relation to the written word and other photographs within a story. Film and video changes photographs in a way that it is the deepest split in what a still image conveys. Showing images over time, allows time to be the context. A good example of that difference is street photography, which gets much of it’s meaning by slicing a moment. You don’t know what came before and what happens after, just that unique moment which is not visible over time. The pun or meaning would be lost in a Gary Winograd photograph if you saw it in action.
I’ve thought in the past on how to display photographs in a new way on the web, because in casual conversation, a photographers’ portfolio online is dismissed with limited meaning or variation. The idea being, a photo portfolio is what it is and there is nothing special to it. It is a book on the web. I believe that is not the case, the translation is not an equal because behavior around these two types of portfolios is different. But playing with the in the way we display of photographs cannot be the only way they work on the web. The use of photographs on the web are a few steps behind the use of text, possibly because technical limitations are more pronounced with photo files: slow bandwidth, need a camera and psychological (we do not primarily communicate with images). So we can look to the written world as a possible model for other uses of photography online. In this particular study, the question is how do we go from broadcast to community using pictures?
While doing research for the midterm project I found a couple of interesting things happening with photographs in the LiveJournal (LJ) community. Two groups that I had found were using photography a lot. The first was Outcastpix where mostly teenagers share images of themselves via a community in LiveJournal. In their “about” statement this is listed, “This is a place for all the outcasts of the world to post their pics. Who cares if you 'dont fit in' you'll fit in here, all goths, freaks, weirdo's, punks, emo-kids, dorks, nerds, whateva. Share your foto art with us.” This community has current membership of 132 with post showing up about every 2-3 days. Other members respond to the images, usually with compliments of beauty or something cool about the shot. Members of Outcastpix return and often re-post. The second place I found use of photography was in the Iluvmyboyfriend community on LiveJournal. It has a membership of 175 with regulars returning to post. The frequency of the posts are greater than the frequency on Outcastpix and I think that has to do that with page content rather than population. Outcastpix is almost entirely based on images with comments to those images; Iluvmyboyfriend includes a lot of text that share the stories of their love. Both groups however, use photographs and their user icons to establish their identities in the group. Outcastpix is about acceptance of visual identity while the photographs in Iluvmyboyfriend prove the wonderfulness of their status as a couple. Who you are in Iluvmyboyfriend is based on who you are dating; visual evidence gets you more social recognition and acceptance. What is also happening in both groups is that they repeat this behavior in their user icons and the images they post. It is hard to distinguish the difference between the two as they both establish identity. The pictures are a vehicle of support and confidence via the web. A thought being: these groups are based on reality of their lives in a time where teens are experimenting with who they are. There is a stronger emotional believability to reactions when they are tied to an image. Encouragement has as stronger weight because it is closer and more representative to the truth than a screen name. This is all under the assumption that a 46-year-old man with a potbelly isn’t posing as a teen girl with a boyfriend for fun.
Going outside of LiveJournal, I looked at photo based blogs. Some of the features that differ from LiveJournal in a blog are that you have full control over how it works and how it looks. It eases web publishing over standard html, so that you can use a database to add content into a design template rather than making a new html document. The structure and the look of the site remains rather independent of the content. Daily publication of a web site is easier when you do not have to think about organization of the site every time you publish something. Digital cameras have also served to remove another time-consuming difficulty. Once you have the picture taken, all you have to do is download it into your computer and then upload it to your server. While film takes addition time, money and effort. First you buy the film, take the picture, develop the picture and have a scan made. Most of that is not likely to happen within a day let alone an hour. The funny thing is, with all the extra time, more people have been using it to manipulate images or publishing them online.
If you’re going to find a community of photo bloggers, you are going to have to go some legwork. They are out there, there just really isn’t centralize structure as in LiveJournal. Although photoblogs.org is a good resource, you are not going to find everyone you want just by searching within it. The blogs on their own do not always encourage a community. Personally, I’ve learned that just because you keep a online diary, even a well thought out one that you’ve asked you friends to read, doesn’t mean your going to get a response. What I’ve seen in even some of the best photographic content is that there minimal online response through the blogs even when there is a place to leave comments. Some photo blogs don’t even have a place to respond. What I have found is a network of people that link to each other from their blogs and usually the link is reciprocated. You can find yourself going to links and enjoying the images, but community interaction between these people is not apparent.
Then there is photoblogs.org started on October 27, 2002, which is a connector in this network of photo bloggers. If you have a photo blog you want included in the list, you just ad the link to your site. The goal is to give high quality photo blogs traffic. On its opening page, you get a list of newly added sites to the list and a chance to vote with a “+” positive, “-“ negative or “x” remove entirely. While “+” and “-“ seems to be part of a voting system, the “x” seems not to fit in because it seems to override the voting process. On the one hand why would you just give a photo blog a negative vote when you could just have it removed? There is no explanation for the voting process and the votes are anonymous and repeatable. Under the section with the new photo blog links you have a list of the top 25 photo blogs based on their votes. There is news section where a plan is stated that this site will develop into a junction for the photo blog community beyond its current status.
One small example of this is that photoblogs.org already links to photo blog on front page called photojunkie.org that is having an event called the Film Exchange. In which the participants get film from another participant without knowing the contents. They develop it and act a curator by selecting 12 images from that roll to put on their own blogs. This event is coordinate through Photojunkie’s site and through a mailing list specifically set up for this event. As of this date, the holiday edition of the Photo Exchange is not complete.
This brings me to examples of photo communities based on goals. The Hiptop Nation and PhotoChallenge on LiveJournal are two active communities on the web doing similar things with getting interesting results.
Hiptop Nation a blog based on the use of a cell phone called the Sidekick, which can take pictures and has web capabilities. The blog started October 4, 2002. It get multiple posts every day (about 2000 to date) but I’m not sure how many participants there are because there is not formal way to join (an email will do) and no listing of those that have emailed without doing your own survey of all the entries. To post on the Hiptop Nation, you send an email (with or without) and image from you Sidekick unit to hn@bedope.com with the subject line beginning with “hn:” that flags software at Hiptop that this a post to the blog. The community is based on the capabilities of this hardware but is not limited to it. A participant can use their digital camera and email the images by following the same instructions but use of the Sidekick is encouraged. The images that the Sidekick produces are the digital equivalent of the Polaroid I-Zone sticky film: small, fun and can do almost anywhere. The features of this blog are relatively simple. For someone who posts, their identity is based on the email address. The post is accompanied by an email address (written in long hand to keep away spammers) on the blog. There are no comments to the images but you can view all the posts by that particular person (their personal blog within the Hiptop Nation) by hitting the “[°|°]” besides the person’s email. The blog however is not viewed on the Sidekick devices. In order to respond to someone’s post, you email them and any conversation about a post continues out of band. Participants do not have the ability to delete entries. From this structure you have a broadcast forum for people doing the same thing as you are, with a limited feedback mechanism. There is almost a definite border around this community because there are not built in linkage to the world outside of this community except for email. The identities of the individuals end with the email.
To turn this into more of a community, enhancements were made on the social level. Mike Popovic, creator of the Hiptop Nation blog organized a scavenger hunt for Halloween. He form personal blogs for each team and invited people to join. There were clear rules for this scavenger hunt and he formed all teams. Each team had a limited membership, but the members could be anywhere in the world. Remotely they all acted together. The technical changes that were implemented for the scavenger hunt were in the team blogs by restricting access in terms of upload to other team blogs to prevent cheating. But you could monitor other teams’ progress in the hunt via the links Mike set up. Again, as with the main blog, deleting is not a feature directly available to the user. Judging was done by not by the computer but humans. In the end this event was a contest and there were goals to be met, inspiring something a whole group of people to rally around.
In the wake of the success of the scavenger hunt, additional motivation is being explored in the blog. With the help of one participant, May, the idea of theme is developing. She has set a blog entry that describes a theme to go shoot pictures by. Mike is encouraging this idea by putting a link to this blog on the head of the page away from the rest of the blogs to signal that this is something different from the rest of the blogs. There was separate sub-blogs for the scavenger hunt and as far as I can tell, there isn’t one for this theme idea. How will anyone easily identify the posts pertaining to this theme considering the site has high volume of posts is unknown to me. In this project’s two day history, I’ve search for participants by scanning the blog of about 100 entries only to find one entry that is clearly part of the theme and a couple that may or may not be part of the theme. It would be nice if they had their own page.
Outside of the theme, most entries consist of things people found interesting to photograph, introductions to the community and tests to see if these devices work. Like we’ve seen in text based world, if there isn’t a goal people will not know what to do in a community. In this community, purpose beyond the equipment is beginning to take form. The PhotoChallenge on LiveJournal has already built what the Hiptop Nation is developing right now: goals based on photographic theme.
PhotoChallenge was born around October 18, 2002 and was build around LiveJournal members who like to take pictures (not around a specific device). It has 156 members with 98 of them actively watching the community from their "friends" section of their journal. PhotoChallenge has daily postings that number from 1 to 35 a day with the average being around 10 posts. There is a moderator (Webkin) of the group since the weekly themes need to be chosen and implemented. This is how the site works, each week a number of themes are presented by Webkin. A voting mechanism is put into place. By Friday, voting ends and Webkin announces the new theme of the week. People begin to shoot and post. Webkin keeps a tally of how many challenges participants have completed. Although there is a tally, there is no winner. If the participant feels bored they can always go back and do challenges for previous weeks. Because LiveJournal doesn’t host the images themselves, Webkin offers the link to a site that will host the pictures for free.
There is plenty of meta-activity on this site besides the challenges. For one thing you can comment on the pictures that people post and on most posts they do. Webkin also posts her thought about whether the themes are too boring i.e. pets, food, writing, etc and want to make them more abstract such as “order vs. chaos”. A dialog in response to her thoughts developed. Anything that lives on the surface of the journal can split off into its own dialog. Another thing that linkage in LJ promotes is fuzzy borders to communities which gives importance to activity and relationships outside of the community as well. This PhotoChallenge is part of a larger world where identity has persistence.
What is interesting about the photography is the variety if interpretations on a challenge in the LiveJournal community. They all seem to strive to be different from the posts of other people. That may have to do with the loose nature of the themes, allowing for creativity in the photographs. In Hiptop scavenger hunt, participants had a very clear list of things they had to photograph as proof that they had found it. In the Hiptop theme, specific instructions are given, also limiting possible interpretations. Both activities in Hiptop Nation are specific and use photographs as proof of truth while LJ’s PhotoChallenge promotes representation of concepts through photographic means.
Photo Wikis are starting to develop and I found one (http://photowiki.ywp.d2g.com/)
roughly the age of the Hiptop Nation and LJ’s PhotoChallenge but activity
has been very sparse in comparison to these other groups. It has a rather interesting
interface using image mapping to link to other images. To me the goal is clear,
to build a relationship based on image mapping, but then again I’ve made
a small-scale prototype of this years ago, so I might be slightly bias toward
the concept. There is even a description on how this works yet the idea may
be too abstract to attract a lot of visitors who can add sophisticated participation.
Its day may be in the future when photo groups desire more than photo scavenger
hunt style activities. The online image language has to develop. There is nothing
inherit in the image-mapping model that cannot be used by more than one person
to build a collection of photographs but time is needed for this idea to develop.
The lessons we have learned using words to build a community can’t quickly
be forgotten when trying to build a community around or using pictures. Images
themselves as in the photoblog ziboy.com, while beautiful do not make a community
because there is no inherent way in the language of a photograph that says “answer
me back with a photo”. Linking to other photoblogs give a sense of community
but not a sense of community activity. The language of photography is hardly
ever literal, the way written language can be. To be practical and get things
done, meta-dialogs in addition to the photographs need to take place. Purpose,
identity and context give photographs expressive power and photographers goals.
A goal-less photograph has no meaning. A sophisticated use of a photograph has
to express something that the written language cannot.
There are two uses for photographs I discovered in this short venture into photo communities. One develops identity and the other is the content of the community. The more passionate the person is toward a community the more thy will develop and maintain an identity. Photographic icons give a sense of real persistence or photographic pseudonimity. It is one step closer than a word in representing an identity that is seemingly truthful. It gives an immediate visual reference to a person. The second, content with photographs will develop as structure and need is designed. While interface design features such as easy uploadability and organization is needed, none of the interfaces in the communities I’ve written about were the most organized. What made them work or not work, as a community was the sense of human intervention, purpose and the understanding of the photographic language.
Are there differences between digital photography and traditional photography?
That depends on what purpose you are looking at. As a tool, yes. We can produce
images faster in the digital world using a digital camera over traditional mean.
This gives the opportunity for the photographs to be seen more than the prints
that hide out in shoe box in a closet. Influencing the type of picture we take,
maybe. The thing is we are only beginning to learn how to use it as a tool.
Once the digital camera is familiar to people the nature of images will begin
to change (excluding the idea of PhotoShop style manipulation, which has already
changed photography). Influencing the type of behavior we exhibit taking pictures,
yes. One person mentioned in the Hiptop Nation that using the Sidekick is more
addictive than crack. Well maybe, but it does add more social elements to process
of photography. I’ve know this since photo school that photography is
not a solitary process, the best results I got from my picture came from group
effort whether it is critiquing or going out to shoot together. Other people’s
involvement influenced personal motivation. The more barriers you remove to
make the community come together, the more interesting the pictures become.
So in planning any new software for community based photography, I would keep
in mind motivation, the equipment, photographer’s own identity and language
of the photographic image. I would encourage specific goals, make it easy and
fun to keep a personal identity, make the site easy to update and be mindful
of current technology that could enhance the ease of the experience. We haven’t
started to make images in the digital medium that are different from the past,
but behaviors are developing that will encourage that change.
Links pertaining to the paper
Identify:
http://www.livejournal.com/~outcastpix
http://www.livejournal.com/~iluvmyboyfriend
Photo blogs:
http://54boy.com/ziboyindex.htm
http://www.hiptop.bedope.com/
http://www.photoblogs.org/
http://www.photojunkie.org/filmexchange/
Communities activity:
http://hiptop.bedope.com/index.php?FILTER=znl@gznvy.pbz&GIMME_ENTRY=1741
http://www.hiptop.bedope.com/halloween.html
http://www.livejournal.com/~photochallenge
Wiki
http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?PhotoWiki
http://photowiki.ywp.d2g.com/
My examples using the wiki technique
http://stage.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~mem201/photos/findyourway.html
click on CORNER OF MY EYE link
http://stage.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~mem201/design/Romania.html