Picture This: the Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photographic Practices’… (Wk10)

Why do we take photos? I take photos so i can remember an experience, have a souvenir, remember my friends, and what we used to look like. I look back at photo’s from only a year ago, and think about in such short time, how much people change. The hairstyles, the clothes, who our friends were, and who we don’t see as much anymore. Another question, why do we take photo’s on our phone, and not a camera, and vice versa? Well, as was discussed in our tute, you wouldn’t take photo’s on your phone at wedding, you would use a proper camera, for quality and the tackiness associated with whipping out a camera phone. However, the usefullness of having a camera feature on our phone means that we can capture funny moments, and events. Like suggested in the tute, some of the most thrilling footage of public events is the ‘raw’ footage taken by onlookers.

Suggested in Gyes article is that taking photos, and sharing photos, help maintain identity, and sustain relationships with others. They don’t just capture the relati0nship –  “Sharing memories through the creation of narratives around them plays an integral role in the construction and maintenance of personal relationships.” Also included, according to Richard Chalfen, photography is ‘primary medium of communication’. I wouldn’t normally think of photography as such, but reading these few lines, it all makes sense. It is so much more then remembering something, but it reinforces who you are, and maintains what you have with your friends – and with everyone. You don’t just need words to communicate. Photos, and the art of photography is just as powerful.

Gye, Lisa (2007) ‘Picture This: the Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photographic Practices’, Continuum,21:2, 279 — 288
http://www.swinmc.net/documents/gye.pdf

Mediated memories: personal cultural memory as object of cultural analysis… (Wk10)

Memory, in this article, is linked to its contemporary meaning, and of course its psychological meaning. It has become a popular term in contemporary research, in which scholars use memory to examine “relation between individual and society, between past and present”. At the beginning of the article, the author writes about having a shoebox of memories: letters, photos, diaries. Over time, the collection of items expand the ‘mediated memories’, but only people of the 70’s and 80’s were likely to make this shoebox collection. A theme that seems to be evident in our readings this week is that ‘media is memory’ – with the author of this article pointing out that people of our day are more likely to use media and technology such as camera’s and video recorders to capture every desirable memory.

Having the ability to capture moments on camera, in my opinion, is crucial for memory to work effectively. Sometimes, I might not be able to remember something off the top of my head, but then when i look at a photo, i will, all of a sudden, be able to remember what I felt, and what I was experiencing at that moment. Photos, personal videos, and letters, all act as cues for a flood of memories that are associated. In the article the example is used of the infant taking his/her first steps, and it being verbally documented as well as documented on video. It is ‘hard evidence’ of a fixed moment in time – not that you need evidence, but a cue to remember something you may have forgotten.

van dijck, José (2004) ‘Mediated memories: personal cultural memory as object of cultural analysis’, Continuum, 18:2, 261 – 277
http://www.swinmc.net/documents/vandijck.pdf

Memento, memory, and montage… (WK10)

Nate Burgos describes the power of memory to act the way it does, “to make sense of our environment”. Burgos talks about memory and the mind, the mind containing memories, and the mind being our domain. Burgos suggests that media is memory.

Although this is a huge slab of quoted text, i particularly love what it is saying…

“Media multiply. This is a constant. Television did not replace radio. The internet did not replace print. New media live adjacent to the old. Within this media ecosystem, memory is the most dominant, the breeder of them all. Memory is media. More than any readable-and-writeable medium, memory provides the most dimensional experience to its users. It is the ultimate cinema-machine. Memory is the camera, the film, the sound, the projector and the screen. A self-serving art form. A live theater of streaming visualization.”

I love this slab of text as we need to stop thinking of new technology replacing the old, but as simply complimenting it. Within all of this it is suggesting that memory, the mind, cannot be replaced. Memory is media, and that is suggested to be the most important of it all. Memory is the camera, it is a collection of images, thoughts and sounds. Like the stream of consciousness, memory is a never ending stream of images, visualizations.