The ability to share pictures with each other immediately through the Internet and e-mail may not be considered as revolutionary as it did a few years ago, but the impact of these changes is becoming increasingly clear.
Today, technological innovation is building and binding new communities of like-minded individuals that could not have existed prior to the development of the Internet. In this way, people are navigating through a maze of social relationships afforded to them by the choices they make Online and off. At the center of this trend is the construction of social identities -- how people conceive of themselves and how others inevitably perceive them.
Digital photography increasingly plays a significant role in the process of how people define and redefine themselves Online. In the construction of social web identities people often must decide who will eventually perceive them through the images they select to place Online. The choices people make in disclosing aspects of personality through photographs may have significant and unknown consequences later in life.
At the same, images, as social and cultural artifacts, eventually become part of a larger, more substantiative collective memory. The pictures shared with friends on the social web, through sites such as Facebook, MySpace, or Flickr, extend meaning beyond an original occurrence by moving from a private identity to a more public display of self. Does interest in public displays of self through photography on the social web suggest that society is becoming even more self-absorbed, self-centered, and self-aggrandizing than it already often appears to be?
For example, a young Muslim woman posts a picture of herself on MySpace. The picture shows the woman exposing a tattoo on the small of her back showing her allegiance to an Islamic political party. Within days, the picture begins to circulate around the world through e-mail and the Internet. The original motive behind the making of the photograph quickly gets lost in Cyberspace as others add to its meaning. The identity of the woman, known only to some, disappears in the ensuing discourse over not who she is as a person, but what she ultimately comes to represent.
There is always the potential for abuse and misrepresentation on the social web as there is in any other form of communication. What is strikingly different, however, is the speed and intensity of the visual messages. To understand our motivation for moving between a private and public notion on and away from the Internet is a fascinating consequence of our increasing need to feel connected, centered, gratified, and in some ways, important. There is little doubt that the popularity and attraction of the social web is about feelings toward establishing and maintaining a public self that moves beyond our initial conceptions of our private self.
Photographs on the social web extend the informational/representational system we are most notably familiar -- that of print media. However, on the social web, the use of photographs may affect how an individual feels about their status and value within self-selected groups, such as with having pictures associated with a Facebook or MySpace profile.