cultivation of the self

Emotional Archives:

Online Photo Sharing and

the Cultivation of the Self

Author: Daniel Palmer [ show biography ]

DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2010.499623

Published in: Photographies, Volume 3, Issue 2

September 2010 , pages 155 - 171

Publication Frequency: 2 issues per year

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To cite this Article: Palmer, Daniel 'Emotional Archives: Online Photo Sharing andthe Cultivation of the Self', Photographies, 3:2, 155 - 171

Abstract

This paper focuses on the archiving of emotion in online photo sharing, andspecifically on biography sites in which we are encouraged to package our lives as asuccession of dramatic moments. It considers how social software functions to animatememory and history in ways that extend photography's role as a medium throughwhich individuals confirm and explore their own identity. The paper focuses on

thisMoment (www.thismoment.com), which innovates certain key features of popularphoto archives such as Flickr and Nokia Lifeblog. On this site, visual “moments” aregiven an emotional classification (“This moment made me feel … happy/proud/etc”).Perhaps more importantly, a dynamic visual timeline enables users to supplementtheir own photographic memories with fragments from the mass media, thereby aidingmemorialization and personalizing history. Such practices inevitably arrive in thecontext of contemporary developments in neo-liberalism, and despite significantcontinuities demand a rethinking of dominant theories of popular photography.

Introduction

In only a few years, the networked snapshot has grown to be a prominent feature ofthe Internet. As Web 2.0 has become a privileged place for social networking, theexhibition and distribution of personal photographs has quickly followed - with onlinephoto sharing on popular sites such as Flickr now part of everyday life for a generationschooled in virtual self-actualization. Personal image making itself has been fuelled bythe new ubiquity of digital cameras, exemplified by camera phone technology. Thenature of these digital snapshots has already attracted considerable attention. Forinstance, there is widespread agreement among researchers that such images areboth more intimate and mundane than earlier forms of personal photography (Gye;

Emotional Archives: Online Photo Sharing and the Cultivation of the Self... http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a926621911&full...

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Murray). Indeed, the immediacy of photo sharing has been compared to sharingexperience itself (Federman 4). One result is that the Internet has provided a space foran ever-accumulating archive of personal visual experience, memory and emotion. Thispaper focuses on the archiving of such feeling in photo-biography or diary sites, inwhich users are encouraged to package their lives as a succession of dramaticemotional moments. These sites deploy elements of broader social networking sitessuch as Facebook to specifically extend photography's role as a medium throughwhich individuals confirm and explore their own identity, while evoking memory andhistory in new ways.

In particular, this paper explores the recently launched site “thisMoment”, which, I willargue, innovates key features of more popular archives such as Flickr. While drawingout these features, I am interested in how discourses of consumer empowermentembedded in a neo-liberal political agenda are configured within commercial software.The crucial process of individualization, as Zygmunt Bauman and others have argued,“consists of transforming human 'identity' from a 'given' into a 'task'” (Bauman 31).That is, contemporary capitalism requires that we must be willing to embrace continualtransformation as an essential condition of contemporary subjectivity. Subsequently,life is framed as a series of events, and “self-realization” becomes a driving force forpromoting consumption. As Brian Holmes has recently put it, despite the promotion ofself-reflexivity in the networked entertainment environment of Web 2.0, “the core valueup for sale is the working consumer, and his or her capacity for self-delusion and themoney s/he will earn and spend” (Holmes). As I will show, precisely this logic may beidentified in the rhetoric and form of online photo-sharing sites.

At least since Kodak commodified the convention of the staged smile in the latenineteenth century, personal photography has been animated by viewers as anemotional event in the service of remembrance. Although the role of photography asmemory is contested, the importance of family photographs as a particular kind ofstorytelling as memory is well established within photography theory. This isparticularly the case for the most archetypal of twentieth-century presentation formats,the family photo album. The album is designed to present a narrative that may bepresented within the family group. The same can be said of the twentieth-centuryformat of the domestic family slide show, which has now been reconfigured in asomewhat less theatrical fashion on the computer display screen or television monitor.Photography critics have long been alert to the ideological function of such stories,and artists such as Jo Spence have actively reframed their dominant uses. The factremains that while seeming to merely record actual moments in family history, familyalbums typically perpetuate myths of coherence and togetherness by favouring happymoments. As such, they are implicated in the naturalization and reproduction of

patriarchal structures of the family and leisure (see Bourdieu; Sontag; Hirsch).1

Notions of “family” are changing. Nevertheless, and importantly for the argument I wishto develop here, family albums still typically restrict their focus to the immediatepersonal history and associated events such as holidays and weddings. That is, theypresent a “vision of the family as a sealed unit, impervious to public events” (Edwards123). Indeed, in my own family's set of chronologically arranged photo albums, anexception to this vision proves the rule. In volume 7, marked “1981-2”, amidst the usualarray of pictures of middle-class domestic life - birthdays, holidays, and Christmases -are a page of three blurry images taken from the TV screen. For reasons that remainunclear, my father, a British migrant to Australia, made a series of pictures of PrincessDiana's wedding to Prince Charles as it was being broadcast live into our living room

(see figures 1 and 2). These photos are a rather unusual interruption of aninternational event into our family albums, even as that event remains entirely faithfulto its overarching purpose of capturing and celebrating key moments of domestic life.


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A “public” event has been hijacked from the televisual flow to become part of myfamily's personal memory and its narrative of identity. Viewing the pictures todaysuggests that this act provided my father with an opportunity to renew his ties to the“mother country”. As Annette Kuhn has observed of such “memory texts”, “private andpublic turn out in practice less readily separable than conventional wisdom would haveus believe” (Kuhn 4).

FIGURE 1. Michael Palmer, Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady DianaSpencer, 29 July 1981, as photographed by my father on TV, in our family album,

1981. FIGURE 2.Michael Palmer, Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer, 29July 1981, as photographed by my father on TV, in our family album, 1981.

Despite significant continuities, current changes to the ways in which we capture, storeand disseminate photographs - and the emergence of online photo-sharing platformsin particular - demand a rethinking of dominant theories of personal photography. AsDaniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis have outlined, the photographs of millions ofindividuals are now contained within online databases connected to each other by ahyperlink, tag, or search term (18). As usual, the uses that people make oftechnologies cannot be known in advance. Flickr, for instance, emerged when its


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originators were developing a multiplayer game; as the photo-sharing feature of theirproject started attracting attention, they concentrated on what became Flickr instead.In the short time since it started operating in 2004, Flickr has attracted millions of usersand now hosts more than 3 billion images, growing at a rate of several thousanduploads per minute. As Susan Murray describes enthusiastically:

Flickr has become a collaborative experience: a shared display of memory,taste, history, signifiers of identity, collection, daily life and judgementthrough which amateur and professional photographers collectivelyarticulate a novel, digitized (and decentralized) aesthetics of the everyday.

(149)

Indeed, Flickr is one of the most active online social networks, and a widely observedaspect of its success is the fact that users can annotate their pictures, adding captionswithin the frame, as well as post comments below other users' photos. Users can alsoappend “tags”, adjectives that describe a photo's category (such as “poodle”, “tattoo”,or “cute”). Thus a verbal textuality accompanies the online posting of the pictures, andthese become “essential elements of participation in the social aspects of photo

sharing” (Rubinstein and Sluis 18).2 Flickr describes itself as an “amazing

photographic community, with sharing at its heart”.3 And indeed, a bewildering array ofinterest groups is evidence enough of this fact. It also means that the conventionalordering of individual photo collections is opened up to a database logic of key wordsand search terms. As Rubinstein and Sluis insist, “tagging subverts any attempt toimpose narrative order on the snapshot collection” (18).

Since 2003, phone cameras have been outselling digital cameras in the US market(and now probably in many other countries as well). Nokia, a mobile phone company,is today's largest manufacturer of cameras. The use of camera phones as a platformfor digital photography is a particularly socialized and normalized in young people'sdaily life, with all its well-publicized hazards. Camera phones afford users the ability todocument, re-present, perform and share the intimacies of the everyday. Even as theirdigital copies might haunt the networks long after they were taken, the imagesproduced by camera phones are typically experienced as ephemeral artefacts, unlikeanalogue photographs that are usually meant to be kept. Indeed, amateur digitalphotography in general, with its ritualized modes of production, on-screen display andnear-instantaneous sharing, may increasingly be considered in terms of an “economyof presence” (Gye 285). Like Polaroid pictures, digital cameras draw on experientialimmediacy for their impact. Likewise, writing of digital photography in her book

Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, media theorist Jos van Dijck refers to “newperformative rituals” and “a bias towards the communicable and the disposable, at theexpense of permanence and durability” (110-11).

The instantaneous feedback and sharing of everyday experience is quite clearly atodds with the traditional function of personal photography, around preservingmemories of meaningful events, echoes of which can still be heard in such recentKodak advertising slogans as “enjoy your memories” (from 2005). However, at thesame time as privileging the everyday and the transient, a technology like the cameraphone can also become a “life recorder”, generating a fragmented archive of apersonal trajectory or viewpoint on the world. The documentation of one's immediatesurroundings goes along with “life-caching” and the desire to build individual andcollective identity in the form of personal and group memory. Moreover, in the digitalworld, “shared experience almost by definition implies distributed storage” (van Dijck116). A key difference with digital archiving practices compared to their analogueantecedents is that the images are publicly accessible (and even revisable) by others


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in their exhibition and sharing. Sites like Flickr represent a fundamental shift inphotography's ontological orientation, as Murray argues:

Instead of evoking loss, preservation, and death, users and viewers areencouraged to establish a connection with the image that is simultaneouslyfleeting and a building block of a biographical or social narrative.

(161)

Thus the photograph's traditional role is simultaneously undermined and reinforced.Personal photography has always functioned as a technology of memory, lending“shape to personal stories and truth claims … producing both memory and forgetting”(Sturken 178). Today, however, photography seems unable “to hold onto time even asit provides avenues for nostalgia and memory” (Murray 161). As memory becomes evermore overtly mediated and shared by digital media, the personal archive becomesnewly fluid.

thisMoment.com

Beyond Flickr, a variety of free online software is now available to help organize and“publish” our personal image worlds for various networked others to engage with -

friends, family and the public (depending on the selected “privacy settings”).4 The siteI want to focus on here, thisMoment - which launched in June 2009 after severalmonths of beta testing - is notable for consciously seeking to reintroduce meaning andorder into one's image life. Indeed, thisMoment's rather modest web header “save andshare the moments of your life” belies its aspiration to organize the chaos of both

personal and media memories via a specially designed visual timeline. As themarketing text states more boldly, the site moves beyond photo sharing; instead, it“leverages everything you already do online . . . and puts it towards a higher purpose:that of saving and sharing the Moments of your life.” The “moment maker” connectswith and can draw on images and video posted to existing Web services - includingFacebook, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube. The “higher purpose” happens in the “momenttheatre”, where users create a “moment flow”. Basically an enhanced slide-show, thistimeline is designed to become “a digital reflection of your life, you over time”. Indeed,the animated visual timeline lies at the core of thisMoment, with one's past on the leftand future on the right. Like the “photostream” on Flickr, images act as an activecentre of motion, rather than fixed objects. ThisMoment thus seeks to remediatepersonal photography in terms of individual self-realization.

While individual identity and self-development is obviously crucial to the overall designlogic of thisMoment, it is worthwhile considering how the site updates and transformsphotography's close association with the idea of “the moment” for the digital age. Quiteapart from Henri Cartier-Bresson's well-known compositional method of the “decisivemoment”, photography is popularly associated with capturing the moment for posterity.Such a formulation is heavily indebted to Kodak, the company that effectively definedamateur photography at the end of the nineteenth century. Through advertisements,manuals and promotional literature, Kodak successfully promoted amateurphotography as a practice centred on capturing “special moments of domestic life”(Murray 152). For instance, a global campaign advertisement from 1913 offered prizesfor the “Kodak Happy Moment”, the best pictures from your summer holidays.Consolidated via a barrage of other advertising campaigns, the tag line “Kodakmoment” has since become a common expression to refer to any moment worth


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remembering as a recorded image. In effect, in the process of valuing the passingmoment with the aim of selling cameras and, more importantly, film, Kodak succeededin commodifying the passing of time itself. We see a parallel move in a recentcampaign for a major credit card company, so-called “MasterCard Moments”. Definedas “priceless experiences”, these moments are sold in advertising campaigns throughphotographs of adventure and romance. The irony of the phrase “priceless moment”cannot be lost in a campaign devised explicitly to encourage credit-fuelled hedonism,in which the real cost is, precisely, detached from the moment of purchase. The

company's website (www.mastercardmoments.com) nevertheless maintains that ithas our existential happiness at heart, wishing to ensure “that every moment youexperience is fulfilling and eminently unforgettable”.

The notion of the unforgettable moment is obviously central to thisMoment, in which amoment is defined on the site as “any experience that has significance or meaning toyou”. As the capitalization of the letter M in the name thisMoment implies, the companyaims to convey a transcendent quality to these moments that define us. Above all,perhaps, thisMoment normalizes a socio-technical project of self-realization for ageneration trained in CV building. That is, thisMoment encourages the self-promotionof both our professional achievements and personal hobbies, as well as life-changingexperiences. These “moments” may be photographic or comprised of any other digitalmedia. In this sense, and in its emphasis on emotional moments, thisMoment offers acontrast to the more dominant everyday aesthetic found on photo-sharing sites. AsMurray describes this more common style, “photography has become less about thespecial or rarefied moments of domestic/family living (for such things as holidays,gatherings, baby photos) and more about an immediate, rather fleeting display ofone's discovery of the small and mundane (such as bottles, cupcakes, trees, debris,and architectural elements) (151). Murray is undoubtedly correct to suggest that theimmediacy of such digital photo sharing signals “a definitive shift in our temporalrelationship with the everyday image” (151). By contrast, however, thisMoment can beread as one of a variety of efforts to resuscitate, salvage or simulate a moreconventional notion of photography as a container for memory, even as it blurs thedifference between photography, video and other media.

On the surface, the timeline at the core of thisMoment is a largely conventional spatialstructuring device, implying a typical narrative of progression. It shares the idea oforganizing images chronologically with the equally family-oriented Nokia Lifeblog (Gye283), which renders the diary searchable via its contents and via automatically andmanually created metadata (a 2006 press release referred to the Nokia site as “the

photo diary that writes itself ”).5 Such a sentiment can be read in light of earlier linksbetween the acquisitive nature of the photographic medium and chronological

evolution. As Pierre Bourdieu writes in Photography: A Middle-brow Art, chronologicalordering is fundamental to the illusion of coherence found in family albums, since “thegroup sees a factor of unification in the monuments of its past unity or … drawsconfirmation of its present unity from its past” (30). Thus the narrative logic of thephoto album persists in thisMoment as a model for personal memory and socialsharing. Likewise, just as a traditional photo album is designed to be viewed by others,the images published online are meant to be watched and commented upon by family,friends and strangers; they are not mere archives or databases to be consulted.Certainly the possibility of remote strangers looking at our private pictures is quite new,but as Patricia Holland has observed, the photo album has long functioned to“translate private meanings into a more public realm” (121). ThisMoment, however,also possesses some novel characteristics that distinguish it from other online effortsto organize our photographic histories. In the following part of my argument, I willelaborate on the three more unique aspects of thisMoment: firstly, that its “dynamic,


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visual timeline” is emotionally coded; secondly, that it directs us to delve backwards

into our analogue archives and to the future hopes and dreams; and finally - perhapsmost importantly - that users are encouraged to introduce public forms of imagerysuch as news media and stock imagery into their photo-biography.

Coding and commodifying emotion

The practice of adding notes to images on Flickr has been widely commented on(Jackson; Murray; Rubinstein and Sluis). But in the logic of thisMoment, each visualmoment is not only identified and itemized but must also be given an emotional value.This happens according to a simple formula of “This moment made me feel …proud/happy/sad”, and so on. Thus, a “first car accident” made Zachary Horn feel“surprised/sad/angry” while “coffee and cake” made “JonnyHG” feel “happy” (see

figures 3 and 4). Indeed, a tick box in the beta mode of the site initially restricted usersto selecting from a limited range of emotions, but this has since been modified tobecome an open-ended response. In this way, like a rating system, thisMoment asksus to formalize and organize our emotional responses to events as we share them withothers. One way of thinking about its time capsules is that they are attempting to offera visual interface to emotion, to “moments that are meaningful and enduring”, as thepromotion suggests. Implicitly, we are asked to evaluate and classify our experiencesby giving them an emotional classification. And unlike traditional photo albums, inwhich we know that what is omitted is as significant as what is included (the funerals,divorces, and so on), thisMoment welcomes the sharing of less positive events andemotions. From the evidence, however, it appears that only minor personal crises aredocumented and shared (accidents, the death of a pet, and so on). A certain type ofembarrassing or painful moment can be framed as “character building” in retrospect.As one would expect from a commercial service, the marketing emphasis focuses onfun and seamlessness - prerequisites for the commercial imperative of an engaging


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user experience.

FIGURE 3. Zachary Horn, First Car Accident: “The length of the tire marks indicatesshe was travelling well over 25”, from First Car Accident on thisMoment, courtesy of

Zachary Horn.

FIGURE 4. Zachary Horn, First Car Accident: “The scar would remain for the next twoyears”, from First Car Accident on this Moment, courtesy of Zachary Horn.

It could be argued that thisMoment's emotional coding is not very different from thepractice of putting pictures into a photo album and adding comments, thus making theimages part of a diaristic narrative, or framing an image in vocal narration. However, by


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tagging the emotion in advance, thisMoment attempts to textually build into thephotographs (and other media) the chains of emotional associations ordinarilyprovoked by an image in the time of its display. In this sense, thisMoment's attempt tosecure the emotion via a caption might be compared to Kodak's Autographic camerasystem, incorporated into a range of camera models sold by the manufacturer between1914 and around 1930. Autographic cameras enabled photographers to make a writteninscription on the surface of the negative at the time of the exposure; after taking aphotograph the user could open up the small door on the back of the camera and

using a provided stylus inscribe a brief note (see figure 5). Kodak ran associatedadvertising campaigns around the catchphrase “Let Kodak Keep the Story”, in whichthe benefits of a date and title were widely promoted. A recurring example used inpromotional campaigns was that of making a note of the age of your child at the timethe picture was made. As an advertisement from 1915 states:

Make your Kodak story of the children doubly valuable, by dating everynegative, by making brief notes that will help, in after years, to recallhappily to memory the incident that led to the taking of the picture.

FIGURE 5. Keep a Kodak Story of the

Baby (advertisement), 1917.

Later campaigns played on the fear of memory loss; advertisements warn of a momentwhen “time has begun playing tricks with memory” (1917) or when “time has playedsad tricks with memory” (1919). As another advertisement from 1919 states, “On eachnegative you may have, not merely the picture story, but the date and title, the full

authentic history”.6

Needless to say, an interesting opposition emerges in these Kodak campaigns inwhich the image itself is associated with the realm of personal memory (a story), whilethe necessary textual supplement is implicitly more public and objective (history).


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thisMoment asks us to take this further, to objectify our emotional memories for thepurpose of sharing them. Of course, Polaroid cameras also reserved a space for auser to write onto the print, to identify a scene and place. And later in the twentiethcentury, point-and-shoot cameras introduced date stamping that pre-empted theinvisible meta-data produced by digital cameras. All of these forms seem to suit thenotion of evidential record (the car accident) as much as highly subjective imagemaking (the party shot). By implication, for thisMoment, as much as Kodak andPolaroid beforehand, a photograph alone cannot be relied upon to properly inspire thememory of dates, places, people and emotions. But what is distinctive aboutthisMoment is that the “owner” of the emotion and meaning of a photograph is theauthor of the photo-biography rather than the photographer. And, as is characteristicof the digital age, this emotional categorizing is constantly revisable, and may becommented on by others; unlike previous modes of codification, there is no physicalnegative or print permanently inscribed with a caption or date.

Past and future in the service of fantasy

A second notable characteristic of thisMoment is that its timeline extends backwards toone's birth (or before), as well as forward into the future to our death (or beyond). Aquick survey of the site reveals that several users have uploaded pictures ofthemselves as children, and even photos of their parents in their own youth. Traces ofpasts that pre-date the memory of the user have been scanned and uploaded, with thenostalgic appeal of black and white photographs enhanced by the otherwise colourfulsite. Anticipations of future moments - in which photography is put to use to imaginepossible future selves-to-be rather than to document one's past - are somewhat lesscommon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these seem to revolve around future purchases.One presumably young adult user published a common desire: “I really hope to buy ahouse to call my own some day”, accompanied by a set of Google images of realestate. Sure enough, this typical life aspiration is subsequently accompanied by a setof commercially sponsored “featured links” to real estate sites. In other words,moments are eminently commodifiable; the visual expression of future desires providesan ideal mechanism for the recording and measurement of brand choices. Here,thisMoment's ideological address is arguably at its clearest; its emphasis on specialmoments is perhaps nothing less than an address to the consumer as a singularsubject, unique in his or her past and future consumption. In this manner, thisMomentenlists emotion in order to participate in the training of the neo-liberal subject as anarcissistic consumer engaged in an endless project of self-making (Illouz).

In its animation not only of the past but also the future, thisMoment seeks to organizeand share both remembrance and expectation, one's life-long desires. As the sitesuggests of its central visual device, “The Moment Theater is a place for you and yourfriends and family to share the Moment - interacting, collaborating, remembering, andlooking forward to the Moments you share together.” All of this updates RolandBarthes' well-known insight that “the age of Photography corresponds precisely to theexplosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value,which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly” (98). Byreconfiguring private experience as a dramatic performance, or a spectacle ofindividual self-fashioning, we are encouraged to become self-conscious spectators, aswell as promoters, of our own lives: “The Moment Theater seamlessly combines yourwords and your media to create a dramatic and unique viewing experience.” This isnothing less than the logic of advertising applied to the presentation of the self, andperhaps a logical extension of what van Dijck identifies as characteristic of digital


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photography in general, with its advancement of “the concept of autobiographicalremembrance as a mixture of memory and desire, or actual pictures and idealizedimages” (107). In thisMoment, one's past and possible future may be expressed andre-imagined in fluid visual statements, grabbed from the global media archive, in aradical updating of the older concept of the personal scrapbook. In this sense, thesoftware becomes a vehicle for the re-contextualization of photographic imagery in theservice of perpetually mobile and transferable desires.

Public media, private memory

Perhaps the most important feature of thisMoment's visual timeline, as I have alreadyindicated, is that it enables users to supplement their own photographic memories(and fantasies) with fragments from the broader visual archive. In other words, unlikethe traditional photo album, and more like a blog, the “moments” do not need to havebeen experienced first hand and their visual record can be publicly available ratherthan privately produced. For instance, a trip to Paris can now be illustrated withimages of the Eiffel Tower found by a quick online image search. Of course, onceagain there is a long history to such practice. In the nineteenth century, before touristsregularly carried their own cameras, images of faraway lands such as Egypt byphotographers such as Francis Frith could be purchased and put into personalalbums; the addition of text turned a generic photograph into a subjective memory of atourist experience, and thus commercial photographs became enhanced memoryimages. Again, in the twentieth century, postcards are often inserted into family photoalbums in lieu of an original photograph of well-known tourist sites; however, theimperative to announce “I was there”, no matter how generic the resulting image,meant that postcards posed no threat to the sale of film or cameras.

Importantly, in a concrete realization of the long-predicted integration of photographywith multimedia, thisMoment invites us to situate our individual memories within wider,more public histories - the broader testimonies provided by the media-managedhistorical record. In an implicit acknowledgement that Western eyes usually experiencethe most important political and social events through media images rather than beingphysically present, we are positioned as witnesses not only of our immediate lives but

also of media testimony.7 But unlike the pessimistic conclusions reached bypostmodern philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard, thisMoment's promotional video,with its upbeat synthesized music, presents this condition as a state of metaphysical

bliss.8 The example cited is President Barack Obama's November 2008 election victoryspeech. Like so many other media memories of events experienced via radio, televisionor the Internet, this memorable media moment is now available for “framing” in one'sonline memory archive just as easily as a personal photograph. The result may beunderstood as an instance of “convergence culture”, where media content flows acrossmultiple channels, producing ever more complex and interdependent relationsbetween top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture (Jenkins 243).While not unique in introducing mass-media content to a biography site, thisMomentdemonstrates an unusual degree of such cross-media mobility, aided by contentarrangements with groups like Time Inc.

In a double action, then, thisMoment asks us to publicize our personal lives as historyand to domesticate historical events, to personalize history. It fuses personal andcollective notions of memory, blurring if not altogether collapsing the distinctionbetween directly experienced and mediated memories and desires. Depending onone's critical point of view, this blurring either affirms postmodern pessimism about the


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collapse of memory into the eternal present of mass media representation or requires amore optimistic rethinking of how we conceive of historical consciousness in terms ofwhat memory scholar Alison Landsberg has called “prosthetic memory”, memories thatwhile not experienced directly “become part of one's personal archive of experience”(26). One thing is clear: inadvertently, thisMoment demonstrates that in order to makeourselves recognizable to others, our account of ourselves requires the account of

what is in fact shared, substitutable.9 However, the placing of publicly available mediafootage on the same level as personal photographs effectively ignores and naturalizesthe ideological content of that media. In stark contrast to forms of participatoryjournalism that encourage us to adopt a critical relationship towards media imagery oreven take control of the means of producing it, thisMoment adopts a conventionallypassive engagement with media flows - precisely as a collection of sentimentalmoments. Users are given no tools or support to critique the official media archive, tolook behind the hyper-managed media fronts and take up more active roles aswitnesses in public space, nor to consider the role of media technologies in the activestaging of history. Instead, we are positioned as mere appropriators of media flows.The underlying message - to see one's life as part of a broader historical narrative -can therefore be compared to Diana Taylor's account of events such as 9/11, whereshe has argued that individuals take photographs to feel directly involved in publiccrises, in order to successfully claim to “have been there” and even to be “interpolatedas potential heroes” (Taylor 252).

Conclusions

Online photo-biography sites are fluid archives for the display to others of one'spersonal and social identity, for the manifestation of public visibility and the socialaffirmation of our existence. And as Jacques Derrida famously observed, “what is nolonger archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way” (18). In effect,these archives are spaces for the construction of what Anthony Giddens calls a“reflexive project of the self”. As a technique of self-formation, they fulfil a similarfunction as the personal diary or blog - an attempt at biographical and narrativeconstruction of oneself, and part of “an-going 'story' about the self” (Giddens 54). Byreconfiguring our everyday reality into a story form, we create a sense of order that iscomforting; this appears particularly appealing given the exceptionally fragmentednature of our present reality. Photo-biography sites like thisMoment are therefore a toolfor the cultivation of the self, the enjoyment of which constitutes a peculiar privilege forthose with the luxury to contemplate their lives as a “journey” towards success.

ThisMoment marks a concrete example of what Fred Ritchin has recently called“hyperphotography”, whereby digital photography evokes a more complex past than asingle moment, is “entwined by other media” and becomes both a “malleabledreamscape and memory magnet” (59). Not only is thisMoment a form of reflexivepersonal archiving, its “moment theater”, “moment flow” and emphasis on a “fluid,interactive timeline” underline the notion that memory is a trace that takes shape in thepresent; we are always recuperating, reconstructing, fabulating belated andphantasmatic accounts of the past. thisMoment underlines the “close interweaving ofmemory, imagination and desire in creating a picture of one's past” (van Dijck 101). Agenerous account of thisMoment would point out that the software acknowledges therelationship between personal and collective memory, the impossibility of a transparentaccount of the past and that self-making is a form of creative agency (Butler 17). Thesoftware offers a highly subjective space for the articulation and sharing of privatememories - unlike the traditional family photo album, which for Bourdieu banishes “all


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the unique experiences that give the individual memory the particularity of a secret”(Bourdieu 31). At the same time, memory is externalized, presented as a selection,framing, or narrative of the past, connected to larger contexts of community, society,and history. Unfortunately, the potential of the resulting insight - that memory andhistory are not oppositional, but entangled - is undercut by thisMoment's commercialorientation; its rhetoric emphasizes the multi-mediated moment as a way to present theauthentic private self, rather than the self's location in society. One is reminded of JayBolter and Richard Grusin's argument that “the hypermediated self is a network ofaffiliations”, constantly shifting but forever seeking to make the self present to itself(232).

The current expansion of the means by which people archive their lives using digital

photography can be understood to be indicative of a cultural anxiety about identity,part of a “larger transformation in which the self becomes the centre of a virtualuniverse made up of informational and spatial flows” (van Dijck 115). Social softwaresuch as thisMoment is one symptom of a process in which the site of domesticphotography is displaced, in which personal cultural memory shifts towards a“distributed presence” (121). The mere fact that the image is no longer frozen in amoment or physically located in time produces a “different relationship with memoryconstructions” (Jackson 178). It certainly has the potential to produce a critical form ofautobiography - one that emphasizes the situatedness of the individual in his or hersocial, historical and technological context. While the potential of such networkedreflexivity is constrained by the more immediate imperative of subjecting partial virtualidentities to marketing calculation, the conventions of the sealed family album arenevertheless increasingly challenged. As van Dijck puts it, “self-presentation, ratherthan family re-presentation - has become a major function of photographs” (113). Thedistinctive swing towards photography as a currency for social interaction musttherefore be interpreted as part of a “broader cultural transformation that involvesindividualization and intensification of experience” (115).

As it happens, despite having significant backing and a former Yahoo executive as itsfounder, thisMoment appears to have failed to make a major public impact, eitherbecause existing online photo-sharing services are satisfying present needs or this

new “moment sharing consumer service” is too complex.10 It would appear there is noready desire to organize one's personal online image world in quite the way thedevelopers hope. Perhaps by its very nature, as an individual biography site,thisMoment is unable to generate the community of producer-viewers that constitutesthe very core of sites like Facebook and Flickr. Nevertheless, thisMoment points toseveral new directions in which the corporate management of photo-sharing and socialsoftware might develop, and for this reason alone is worthy of our attention. To theextent that the entirety of our lives becomes ever more available as a digital archive,photography is opened up as a site of dialogue in relation to other elements of mediaculture. It hardly seems coincidental that the notion of “the moment” is re-privileged, ina freshly individualized mode, precisely when both the stability of memory and the stillphotograph's ability to capture events and generate shared experiences appear sothreatened.

Notes

1 Fuelled by feminist theory and the boom in memory studies, recent years have seenconsiderable scholarly interest in family photography and the family album.

Publications include Julia Hirsch's Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect


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(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 morerewarding when they're able to leave you feedback. Notes allowcontacts to leave messages directly on your photos and videos (don'tworry, they only appear when you mouse-over the image), whilecomments 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 itsheart. Groups are a way for people to come together around acommon interest, be it a love of small dogs, a passion for food, arecent wedding, or an interest in exploring photographic techniques.

And if you can't find a group which interests you, it's super-easy tostart your own. Groups can either be public, public (invite only), orcompletely private. Every group has a pool for sharing photos andvideos and a discussion board for talking.

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

4 Jos van Dijck examines memory storage software such as Shoebox, Lifestreamsand MyLifeBits, concluding that most software fails because it conceptualizes memoryas 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 andits 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 dailyexperiences and unforgettable moments, like a child's birth or afriend's wedding and storing them all in one place. The memories youwant to share can be easily posted to the web. The blogs can beaccessed 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 suchas architects and engineers who could make use of “valuable notations”. Autographic


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film was discontinued in part due to the increase in sensitivity of available filmemulsions.

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

8 Jean Baudrillard is specifically concerned about real-time media such as televisionthat bring on the “[s]imultaneity of the event and its diffusion in information” (25). ForBaudrillard, this is associated with a series of crises - the difficulty of separating theillusion of the image from the real world, the “real” foundering in “hyperrealism”, theloss 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 myselfrecognizable and understandable, then I might begin with a narrativeaccount of my life. But this narrative will be disoriented by what is notmine, or not mine alone. And I will, to some degree, have mademyself substitutable in order to make myself recognizable.

(37)

10 In revising this paper in early 2010 I returned to the site, only to discover thefollowing notice: “We've moved our moment sharing consumer service to

http://www.thismoment.com/moments”. The overall site is now pitched squarely atcompanies 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 betweenconsumers and brands.”

Works cited

1. Barthes, Roland (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography Fontana ,London2. Baudrillard, Jean Zurbrugg, Nicholas (ed) (1997) Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual

Reality. Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact pp. 19-27. Institute of Modern Art ,Brisbane

3. Bauman, Zygmunt (2000) Liquid Modernity Polity , Cambridge

4. Bolter, Jay David and Richard, Grusin. (1999) Remediation: Understanding

New Media MIT P , Cambridge, MA

5. Bourdieu, Pierre (1989) Photography: A Middle-brow Art Polity , Oxford

6. Butler, Judith (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself Fordham UP , New York

7. Derrida, Jacques (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression U of Chicago P


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, Chicago

8. Edwards, Steve (2006) Photography: A Very Short Introduction Oxford UP ,Oxford

10. http://www.vodafone.com/flash/receiver/15/articles/pdf/15_08.pdf —

Federman, Mark. “Memories of Now.” Receiver 15 (2006). 20 Oct. 2009

12. Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the

Late Modern Age Polity , Cambridge14. Gye, Lisa (2007) Picture This: The Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on

Personal Photographic Practices. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

21.2 , pp. 279-288.

15. Hirsch, Marianne (ed) (1999) The Familial Gaze Dartmouth College ,Hanover, NH16. Holland, Patricia Wells, Liz (ed) (2004) 'Sweet it is to scan …': Personal

Photographs and Popular Photography. Photography: A Critical Introduction pp.117-164. Routledge , London

17. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1004/msg00026.html —

Holmes, Brian. “Re: The Return of DRM.” Post to Nettime mailing list. 29 Apr.201019. Illouz, Eva (2009) Emotions, Imagination and Consumption: A New Research

Agenda. Journal of Consumer Culture 9.3 , pp. 377-413. [ crossref ]

20. Jackson, Helen (2009) Knowing Photographs Now: The Knowledge

Economy of Photography in the Twenty-first Century. Photographies 2.2 ,

pp. 169-183. [informaworld]

21. Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media

Collide New York UP , New York

22. Kuhn, Annette (1995) Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination Verso, London

23. Landsberg, Alison (2004) Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of

American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture Columbia UP , New York24. Murray, Susan (2008) Digital Images, Photo-sharing, and Our Shifting

Notions of Everyday Aesthetics. Journal of Visual Culture 7.2 , pp. 147-153. [

crossref ]

25. Ritchin, Fred (2009) After Photography Norton , New York

26. Rubinstein, Daniel and Katrina, Sluis (2008) A Life More Photographic:

Mapping the Networked Image. Photographies 1.1 , pp. 9-28. [informaworld]

28. Sontag, Susan (1978) On Photography Penguin , Harmondsworth29. Sturken, Marita Hirsch, Marianne (ed) (1999) The Image as Memorial:

Personal Photographs in Cultural Memory. The Familial Gaze pp. 178-195.Dartmouth College , Hanover, NH

30. Taylor, Diana (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural

Memory in the Americas Duke UP , Durham, NC

31. Van Dijck, Jos . (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age Stanford UP ,Stanford

List of Figures


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FIGURE 1.Michael Palmer, Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer, 29July 1981, as photographed by my father on TV, in our family album, 1981.

FIGURE 2.Michael Palmer, Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer, 29July 1981, as photographed by my father on TV, in our family album, 1981.


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FIGURE 3. Zachary Horn, First Car

Accident: “The length of the tire marks indicates she was travelling well over 25”, fromFirst Car Accident on thisMoment, courtesy of Zachary Horn.

FIGURE 4.

Zachary Horn, First Car Accident: “The scar would remain for the next two years”, fromFirst Car Accident on this Moment, courtesy of Zachary Horn.


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FIGURE 5. Keep a Kodak Story of the

Baby (advertisement), 1917.

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