Emotional Archives: Online Photo Sharing and the Cultivation of the Self

Abstract

This paper focuses on the archiving of emotion in online photo sharing, and specifically on biography sites in which we are encouraged to package our lives as a succession of dramatic moments. It considers how social software functions to animate memory and history in ways that extend photography's role as a medium through which individuals confirm and explore their own identity. The paper focuses on thisMoment (www.thismoment.com), which innovates certain key features of popular photo archives such as Flickr and Nokia Lifeblog. On this site, visual “moments” are given an emotional classification (“This moment made me feel … happy/proud/etc”). Perhaps more importantly, a dynamic visual timeline enables users to supplement their own photographic memories with fragments from the mass media, thereby aiding memorialization and personalizing history. Such practices inevitably arrive in the context of contemporary developments in neo-liberalism, and despite significant continuities demand a rethinking of dominant theories of popular photography.

Notes

1 Fuelled by feminist theory and the boom in memory studies, recent years have seen considerable scholarly interest in family photography and the family album. Publications include Julia Hirsch's Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect (1981), Jo Spence and Patricia Holland's edited volume Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography (1991), Annette Kuhn's Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995), Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997) and her edited volume The Familial Gaze (1999).

2 Flickr's “Keep in Touch” section states:

• Posting photos and videos for friends and family to see is much more rewarding when they're able to leave you feedback. Notes allow contacts to leave messages directly on your photos and videos (don't worry, they only appear when you mouse-over the image), while comments allow for a more general discussion below the image.

3 Encouraged by the website promotion:

• With millions of users, and hundreds of millions of photos and videos, Flickr is an amazing photographic community, with sharing at its heart. Groups are a way for people to come together around a common interest, be it a love of small dogs, a passion for food, a recent wedding, or an interest in exploring photographic techniques. And if you can't find a group which interests you, it's super-easy to start your own. Groups can either be public, public (invite only), or completely private. Every group has a pool for sharing photos and videos and a discussion board for talking.

  (Share, <http://www.flickr.com/tour/share>)

4 José van Dijck examines memory storage software such as Shoebox, Lifestreams and MyLifeBits, concluding that most software fails because it conceptualizes memory as a technical process rather than a cultural one (van Dijck 155).

5 As Lisa Gye observes, Nokia promotes its Lifeblog as a family-friendly platform and its advertising emphasizes the family connection (283). Gye quotes Nokia's publicists, who wrote in 2005 that:

• Nokia Lifeblog provides a simple method of capturing your daily experiences and unforgettable moments, like a child's birth or a friend's wedding and storing them all in one place. The memories you want to share can be easily posted to the web. The blogs can be accessed by the family, friends and colleagues via a password-protected area, or can be available for general access.

  (283)

6 Autographic cameras were also marketed along utilitarian lines to male users such as architects and engineers who could make use of “valuable notations”. Autographic film was discontinued in part due to the increase in sensitivity of available film emulsions.

7 Steve Edwards proposes an analytic division: “whereas memory entails association built on personal experience, testimony can involve events with which individuals have had no first-hand encounter but have access to through documentary records. Both memory and testimony involve forms of witnessing” (126).

8 Jean Baudrillard is specifically concerned about real-time media such as television that bring on the “[s]imultaneity of the event and its diffusion in information” (25). For Baudrillard, this is associated with a series of crises – the difficulty of separating the illusion of the image from the real world, the “real” foundering in “hyperrealism”, the loss of history memory and the instantiation of an eternal present.

9 As Butler puts it in a more general context:

• If I try to give an account of myself, if I try to make myself recognizable and understandable, then I might begin with a narrative account of my life. But this narrative will be disoriented by what is not mine, or not mine alone. And I will, to some degree, have made myself substitutable in order to make myself recognizable.

  (37)

10 In revising this paper in early 2010 I returned to the site, only to discover the following notice: “We've moved our moment sharing consumer service to http://www.thismoment.com/moments”. The overall site is now pitched squarely at companies wishing to engage in brand-building using social media: a service called “Distributed Engagement Channel” promises to “Upgrade your presence on YouTube, Facebook and the iPhone … to create, nurture and sustain connections between consumers and brands.”