Sensory experiences of digital photo-sharing-"mundane frictions" and emerging learning strategies

Abstract

Digital technologies are increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life forming part of the way we live and experience the world. This article will specifically scrutinise how mobile phone cameras, digital photographing and the use of webbased photo-sharing sites and communities become part of the meaning-making practices through which the everyday is lived and understood. In doing so, I advance the concept of â€â€mundane friction'' through which to discuss the experience, meaning-making and pedagogy generated through operating screen-based technologies. Indeed, media participates in everyday worlds beyond its role as a provider of content and for communication. The question that will be addressed here is how this media presence can be understood from an embodied and sensory perspective, and is based in a study of sensory aspects of teenagers use of web-based photo-diaries. Further, this discussion leads to questions of how an appreciation of digital visuality as more than representational acknowledges the meaning of mundane friction caused by habitually touching, rubbing, clicking, pinching through media technologies as part of the sensory emplacement process that establish people as situated learners. In turn, problematising this tangible friction as pivotal for understanding digital visuality gives reason to argue for research methods that acknowledge digital visual material as more-than-visual and theory that moves toward the unspoken, tacit and sensory elements of learning in everyday practices. Thus, the aim of this article is to elaborate on the embodied, the methodological and the pedagogical dimensions of â€â€mundane friction'' in meaningmaking activities, and its pedagogical implications.