According to an article in this month's Discover magazine, "Photoblogs are not purely extroverted. It's nice to share your cat pictures with perfect strangers, but it's arguably more valuable to create a visual diary as an extension of your memory."
I think the author, Steven Johnson, has the right idea here. Photoblogging is more than some narcissist's wet dream. Blogging is about carving out some individual and collective space amidst a cacophony of voices. Photoblogging is an attempt to grasp memory in a world that seems to be spinning faster and faster out of control -- a world, with the immediacy of communication technologies, that appears to make the distances between peoples so much shorter. Perhaps this is just illusion. Perhaps there is something to the criticism that photoblogging is more "me" than "thee".
For Johnson, "Digital cameras are leading the way toward a passive diary keeping, in which common forms of personal technology churn along in the background."
The history of collective memory favors the "collective" as a tendency toward nationalism. Marie-Claire Lavabre notes, "Collective memory can be defined as an interaction between the memory policies – also referred to as “historical memory” – and the recollections – “common memory,” of what has been experienced in common. It lies at the point where individual meets collective, and psychic meets social."
In the blogosphere, the production of a cultural "collective" memory shifts as content moves from the domain of institutions to the domain of individuals. Photoblogging is about the multiplicity of experiences and recollections that is both highly individualized, as well as highly public.
In the production of a cultural collective memory photoblogging suits our increasingly revved-up lifestyle. As Johnson argues, "Even low-resolution camera phone pictures can be worth a thousand words. It takes time to jot down a paragraph or two describing your day at the office, but it takes only a few seconds to snap a few images. And because visual memory is so powerfully associative, when you see these images 10 or 20 years from now, it’s likely that a whole host of other memories from that day will come rushing back."