Taking and circulating photographs with digital tools and networks has become one of the most popular new media practices around the world. Youths and adults are snapping digital images and sharing them with their friends, family members, and wider audiences. Due to the widespread adoption of mobile phones with embedded cameras, the development of the world wide web and social media, and the popularization of the practice of photo-sharing, photography has gone through a process of democratization that has completely transformed its meaning and aesthetics.
Photography has become more social and networked. Today, digital photographs are made and distributed by many, using many-to-many and peer-to-peer forms of communication. The meaning of photography has changed from something reserved to extraordinary moments, the family, and past memories, towards an emphasis on the present, the individual, and the immediacy of everyday life.
The new aesthetics of networked photography can be appreciated on the popular genre of the selfie, a photograph of oneself taken with a cellphone that is usually taken with a mobile phone. The selfie genre gives us clues of the aesthetics of networked photography. It emphasizes the performance of an identity, the self-reflection, and the blurring of boundaries between public and private. The selfie photograph acquires meaning as it circulates on social media, as it becomes part of an user profile or part of the feed of content that is aggregated from millions of updates.
A query for the #selfie hashtag on Instagram retrieves more than 280 millions of posts. These self-portraits are part of an expanding repository of images built on a social media platform by users avid of performing their identity in public. Publishing ephemeral present moments online and allowing them to flow across the feeds of followers, on a stream of images curated by the taste of the users, is part of the meaning of networked photography. Part of the value of this kind of photography relies on how a productive audience engages with the image, and how it likes it, comments it, or re-circulate it. The more the image circulates and gains likes, the greatest its value. The more it is being shared the more than the privacy of a self-portrait becomes public.
