--> Significance of meta data to image economy: 2 types of meta data- firstly the one the camera gives it (data, shutterspeed, camera make location) and the next is the tags comments, viewing, pins, ratings etc.
---> Tagging can be seen as democratic, users can make popular images by tagging them/ like bombing, tag spamming, etc distorting the algorithms of search engines. This realeses images from their stillness- new meaning and continuous re-invention, and it gives users the ability to control and change this.
--> Meanings of photos on the internet becomes unstable; meta data can be changed, and the ability to distort the algorithms of the search engine mean that some images can become more viewed. Also, users can delete/change their interactions, so continuous changing nature/value of photographs. The far-ness of an image from the original also means it seems to have a destabilization of meaning; there is no link between original meaning, users give it meaning. Suggests that this doesnt mean there is less meaning, just less foundations.
---> Networked image is instantaneous, and can be given many representations and significant; up to user. This makes it not static.
---> a digital image is never singular; it can reblogged, retweeted, repeated, etc etc
LINKS to "From public spheres to public screens", and the idea that photo has become the most important economy: "Images create reality", "image events", photographs and TV images have become a new currency by which we discuss ideas and there is public discourse. What is important is what becomes talked about on the news and which images circulate and gain cultural capital.
The idea of a "public screen", where everything acts on dissimulation via images; the public use images as a way to understand the world, and reality, and can use images as a way to get power; if an image gains lots of internet attention, it often has to addressed (jn a political system)
Susan Sontang:
To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's life, and therefore, to go on with
one's life, oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera's non-stop attentions --- or
to stop, and pose. To act is to share in the community of actions recorded as images. The
expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked
victims is only part of the story. There is the primal satisfaction of being photographed, to
which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times)
but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for
the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you
couldn't take a picture of them.
The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib reflect a shift in the use made of
pictures --- less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. Most
soldiers possess a digital camera. Where once photographing war was the province of
photo-journalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers --- recording their
war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities --- and
swapping images among themselves, and e-mailing them around the globe.
There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or
especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time ---life isn't
edited, why should its record be edited? --- has become a norm for millions of webcasts,
in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show.
David Bates: Photographic Theory
Three types of photographic theory: the Victorian aesthetic, (photos; reality versus art, whether photography is just a "copy") 1920/30's and mass reproduction (photography as a new way to see things, changes the way we represent ourselves and view each other, change in "meaning") and 1960/70's (photography as a significant formation of social/political/cultural meaning)
Semiotics- the idea of signs and signifiers, connotation and denotation within a photo. The way we understand the world is by a "structure" of understanding based on a language of signs, the signs add together to make meanings. There is only an arbitrary meaning between word and photo. Photographs are a representation of a signifer, (representation without words) but the meaning of this signifer can have polysemic meanings depending on cultural context and language.
Barthes and Saussure are important men in this theory; recognized a relationship between signier and signified. They both helped to devolop the idea above in terms of structuralism.
The way we understand photography depends on a set of codes- perspective, focus, the understanding of how a photo works. Importantly: Rhetoric; the idea that we understand a photo is made up of codes; they are constructed by a photographer and by society. Photographs can be manipulated and used to form an argument.
There is an argument between semiotics and realism; realism focuses on the similarities between the signifer and the signified, the reality the photo catches (when we look at a photo, we know it "happened",) whereas semiotics looks at the differences between the two (the photo signifies a reality, but what is signified is polysemic and constructed. We know that someone took a photo there, but the reality and "truth" of it are disputed)
post structuralism: That structures can change and be controlled, and that there is a deeper form of looking which is to do with the human psyche and nature. Relates to punctum?
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