Hi everyone!! I am back again!! It has been a busy few weeks since the last time I posted. Many readings, many assignments, lots of hours at work, but I am here with you guys again. These past few weeks in my Social Media and Society class, we have covered a lot of different topics. In this post, I will be explaining and giving some examples of some of the topics we have covered so far in the semester. Alright, let me stop wasting your time with this intro and get into it. Here are some of the things we have been covering in class.
Remembrance
One of the first things that I really remember agreeing with Lee Humphreys on is his thoughts on remembrancing. When I think of why people want to post pictures or videos of something significant that happened, I think that they want to share and/or show off to others what they are doing. But I also think it's to be able to go back and remember what that time was like. I think the same things when people want to make an update on Facebook or make a tweet on Twitter about their current thoughts. The only difference is that a majority of the time, no pictures are included in tweets or status updates. But it still is the same idea. They want to go back and remember how they felt at that moment when they posted it. In chapter four of Humphreys' book, he basically has the same idea about why people post videos or pictures to their social media pages. Humphreys' defines remembrancing as "creating a media trace about an experience that allows us to hold on to moments or experiences."
I think it is pretty safe to say that a majority of us have experienced posts like what I am describing; which makes this the perfect example of remembrancing. A lot of my Instagram feed now is people who I knew in high school posting their vacation pictures, first day at their new job, exciting things they have been up to, and their big accomplishments. There are rarely any posts like I once saw in middle school and high school. It has been forever since I have seen a "Like for a TBH, rate, and date", "Felt cute, might delete later", or one of those cheesy quotes that everybody used. Even posts like this that I know certain people have posted before, have no trace on any of their Instagram pages. I believe that this is connected to Humphreys' idea of performing identities. Performing identities is basically when people want to align their identities with what they post, but they also want to remember what was going on when they posted it. As time has moved on, these people no longer want to be associated with something childish that they once did. They also probably did not want to remember how cringy they were actually being at a young age. I don't know... maybe it's a good thing that they deleted it so nobody has to go back and remember that time on Instagram.
Documentary Vision
Documentary vision is a concept that I found very interesting. In Nathan Jurgenson's book called The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, I understood documentary vision as people capturing moments that they are deeming worthy of posting and other people viewing. A lot of people now-a-days see something or experience something that we automatically think about posting it and thinking of the perfect caption to go along with it. People rarely take pictures without the intention of posting it so every one of their followers can see. When they take the pictures, they have everything positioned perfectly and have the lighting close to as perfect as they can get it.
The perfect example of this is influencers and celebrities. I have seen videos that others have taken of celebrities and influencers "behind the scenes" of them or someone else taking pictures of them. From the videos, they end up looking like impromptu photoshoots. They will, in what they think is a memorable moment and take multiple pictures, use different poses, and have the perfect lighting. After they choose the best looking picture that was taken, they then go and filter and edit it, so it can look perfect for others to view.
Something I think is important about documentary vision is that people can capture how things used to be. The world is constantly changing, so having a picture to have and look back on to see how much it has changed is very important. Someone can have an adventure or something important can happen in a field, and they'll take a picture of it. When they revisit that picture in the future, they could be interested in going to that field only to find that it was turned into a mall.
Both of these topics that I have discussed are interesting to me and have helped me further understand some of the reasons why people post what they do.
I hope you also learned a little more from this post!! I'll see you later :)
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