Smartphone art

Despite its prevalence and increasing political influence, social media continues to polarise. Many people still find it baffling as to why so many others choose to regurgitate intimate details of their lives online for an army of strangers, and why those strangers are so keen to consume.

This desire to share personal content with global networks was the central premise that sociology student Zack McCune set out to explore, spending four months examining user behaviour in social media’s latest trends: networks that communicate in mobile photography.

Rather than the banal vanity often presumed by social media’s detractors to clog up these channels, McCune found that users encourage each other to pursue increasingly artistic visuals, experimenting with colour and composition, and often carefully crafting the content they post.

To begin with, McCune needed to select a network as a case study. So as not to be overwhelmed with a vast body of content, he settled on what was a new, mobile app-based network called instagram, which operates in a similar way to Twitter, with followers and trending topics, only using photos as the primary method of communication.

“The static, visual aspect of photos was important in defining value as it binds the subject area,” explains McCune. “What inspired the capture of a moment and what was so personally rewarding in sharing it.”

This introduced the field of smartphone photography, or ‘iPhoneography’. The rapid increase in mobile camera sophistication is the latest stage in the shrinking space between seeing and sharing. “Since the Kodak Brownie, through to the Polaroid Instant and into the age of digital photography, technology has been closing the time between taking a photo and sharing it” says McCune. “Smart phone cameras and apps like instagram mean that you can offer a photo to global networks faster than typed text in many instances.”

“During recent events such as the London riots and Hurricane Irene, reports of damage and unrest were validated in part by mobile imagery, some of which appeared in traditional broadcast media.” Ironically in the case of the London riots, social media was blamed in some quarters for facilitating the trouble, which led to some MP’s calling for the power to shut down such networks at times of national crisis.

But people don’t just share imagery when newsworthy events take place in their vicinity. As with other social media networks, the vast amount of content on instagram documents daily activity and routine, normal folk doing normal stuff, but iPhoneography allows people to display their lives in visually arresting ways. This presents a creative challenge.

McCune says: “The body of my research involved engaging directly with individual instagram users from across the platform, and I found that users are highly concerned with both personal production and social reception. Critically, they weren’t simply capturing but consciously crafting the imagery they shared.”

Deliberate artistry when creating content was a point of pride for many of the users. Instagram offers the ability to use a variety of filters that produce different effects, and the desire to create striking visuals through effects and interesting perspectives to impress the community was a key motivator. This led many to conclude that iPhoneography has encouraged them to look closer at their environment.

“All of the users I interviewed celebrated the creative aspects of iPhonography and the way it altered how they went about their day. Users enjoy thinking more imaginatively about the places they live and the people and events that surround them, seeing the world in new ways as they cultivate their own distinctive visual styles. It was amazing to discover that many instagram users felt the combination of a creative practice and a supportive community offered something therapeutic.”

Some users described the validation they got from the instagram community as empowering, overcoming social anxieties and even physical ailments such as deafness. One participant wrote that they use instagram “for my mental well-being, if I’m honest. It’s a form of escapism where I can truly indulge my creative side.” The responsive audience available through the network encourages people to share more, but also to engage more.

“In interviews, users routinely spoke of ‘community interaction’, leading them to go beyond simply posting and engage with the content of others in meaningful ways.” says McCune. “It is very much like a karma system. You must participate both as a producer and a consumer.”

As one user put it: “The community itself is addictive. I am spurred on by other users comments and critiques, inspiring me to take more pictures to show the community: it feeds itself!”

McCune feels that current academic views on social media tend to be starkly divided between critics of its perceived conformity and amateur content on one hand, and proponents whose appreciation is often theoretical and lacks in-depth analysis on the other. He concedes that part of the reason for this is the technology moves at such a dramatic rate that it is constantly outpacing research.

“Sociology, I believe, is doing a great job of looking at the value of social media from first-hand, user-based research rather than imposing theory from above. My findings differ from many of the previous academic views by suggesting that social media can be very creative and communal rather than vapid and self-centred, as some critics have contended,” he says.

“Emerging digital networks are generated by users and it’s important we re-centre the focus on them and not the engineers and structures that define network actions. Social media is a culture of very real and very engaged people, we need to look and listen to the users.”

Zack McCune graduated from Cambridge with an MPhil in Sociology in 2011 and is now working for the mobile image-sharing platform Piictu based in New York City.