Out in the open: locating new vernacular practices with smartphone cameras

ABSTRACT

We are living in a moment where new types of visuality and vernaculars are emerging. For many of us sharing of objects such as photos and video has become a part of our daily routines. The sheer volume of videos and photos uploaded to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram provide ample evidence of our desire to document and share our most ordinary moments. Details of our lives are out in the open through the entangled zones of smartphones, networks and geography. In this paper, I explore some of the entanglements of video and photography have with life our lives, both physically and through social media, and how these might be understood within a broader context of emplaced visualities through a short and sharp digital ethnography of how creative practitioners who participate in social media groups use photographs and video.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Marsha Berry is the program manager for the creative writing degree in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. She is co-editor of the book, Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). Marsha supervises postgraduate research students across a range of topics concerned with new media arts, narrative, creative writing and mobility. Since 2004, she has been researching the connections between mobile media, place, memory, collaboration and creative practices and has published her work extensively in international journals such as New Media and Society as well as in edited books. She is also a writer and artist whose practice includes filmmaking, participatory art projects, and poetry.