Common Banality: the Affective Character of Photo Sharing, Everyday Life and Produsage Cultures

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the emergent new media practice of mobile blogging (moblogging) and photo sharing online, specifically focusing on how this practice has evolved within a specific community in Copenhagen. Through a 3.5 year long ethnographic fieldwork among everyday photographers in Copenhagen and 14 individual interviews with Flickr.com users, the dissertation both examines how individuals and collectives integrate technology into their everyday lives, especially what constitutes the process of becoming a moblogger. Compared to related research this dissertation deals explicitly with everyday photographers who document all the mundane and banal situations and contexts of their daily life. It is primarily analytic rather than theoretical in its approach. The analysis is centered on two main questions approached differently throughout the chapters: 1. How user generated media reconfigure the spectacle through changes in the productionconsumption circuit. 2. How everyday photography enables a creative practice relating it to the affective character of everyday life and the urban environment. These two aspects are approached with a combination of fieldwork data and theory (primarily Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Stuart Hall, Gregory Seigworth and the Situationist International). The dissertation commences with a review of existing literature on camera phone usage, moblogging and photo sharing. Chapter two deals with different methodological issues related to my fieldwork, my interviews and the development of a new research method. This method – dubbed the GRID – was employed in group interviews with Flickr users in which they talked on the basis of their own pictures about how everyday photography, moblogging and photo sharing have been integrated into their everyday life. The thesis does not have a specific theoretical chapter; different theories are introduced throughout the analysis when considered relevant. In chapter three the analysis begins with a mapping of how my informants became mobloggers. This chapter will also describe what characterizes photo sharing, everyday photography and moblogging as 5 a photographic practice. Along with this we will see why they have chosen Flickr as the site to share their photos on, and we will also see how their style developed. At this point it will already be evident that their community is important for many of the practices that they participate in so in chapter four we will look into community aspects. In chapters five and six everyday life will be related to their practice. Chapter five primarily deals with different theories of everyday life, in that it tries to explain what it is about everyday life and its mundane character that makes them want to document it. In explaining this we will witness how capitalism and everyday life, with its mundane habits and routines, foster a creative form of play when documenting our everyday life. We will also identify how the practice of everyday photography and photo sharing mediates between Lefebvre’s triadic structure of everyday life. Especially the affective character of everydayness provides an argument for developing an explanation of why they document the most mundane and banal aspects of everyday life. This chapter also identifies a new form of aesthetic living through a reconfiguration of Mike Featherstone’s theory. In chapter six we focus on how everyday photography, moblogging and photo sharing are integrated into the structures and different practices of everyday life. We will view their practice as a form of rhythmanalysis in which a new rhythm is created by specific relations between time, space and agency, resulting in a reconfiguration of the concepts of presence and present. This will lead us into chapter seven in which we will focus on various collaborative practices related to the way in which value is generated for the users of Flickr, and also look into how the creation of meaning and signification becomes collective and thus restructures the spectacle. Chapter eight deals with the relations between the city, moblogging and photo sharing, illustrating how these practices enable an electronic form of psycho-geography and dérive, techniques important for the revolution of everyday life as it was put into practice by the Situationist and Debord. Chapter nine will identify how user generated content can become enclosed within capitalistic structures, thus transforming their practice into relations that resemble work. In mapping how this happens, new places for a Marxist critique in contemporary society characterized by new means of production will be identified. In chapter ten the conclusion 6 will summarize some parts of the dissertation by mapping the different reconfigurations that have been identified throughout the thesis.