Y!RB Brain Jam: Nancy A. Van House - Performing Ourselves: Flickr as a Technology of Memory, Communication, and Expression November 9, 2007

Free and open to the public, followed at 4pm with a Social Jam that includes refreshments - and beer. It would be helpful if you mark attending/watching above.

Performing Ourselves:
Flickr as a Technology of Memory, Communication, and Expression

Nancy A. Van House
School of Information
University of California, Berkeley

Personal photography is more popular than ever. Thanks to new technologies for image-making and sharing, people are making more images than ever and using them in both old and new ways. And photos are a major type of user-generated content. Knowing why as well as how people make, archive, and share photos may be useful for designing better technologies to support these activities and for encouraging user-generated image-based content.

I’ll report findings from an on-going qualitative study of people’s use of Flickr.com, which is expanding the content and uses of personal images, their time dimension, audience, and even ownership. To understand what we’re seeing I’ll draw on (1) social construction of technology, (2) performance theory, and (3) multimodality and the epistemology of images. I argue that, with digital images and technologies like Flickr, people are performing (not just representing) their relationships and identities in new ways, appropriating image-based technologies to support their on-going construction of self and relationships.

Nancy Van House is a Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Her current research draws on visual studies, new media, and science and technology studies to understand the uses of image-based new media.

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