Searching For and Presenting Authenticity in the Post-Facebook Age

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Mar 01, 2013
by Louise Hallman
Searching For and Presenting Authenticity in the Post-Facebook Age

Democratization and decentralization of photojournalism

Panellists Toscano, Munthe, Linder and Oates discuss the democratization of photography When it first launched in 2004, Facebook allowed its users to have one photo. That profile picture was expected to remain static, similar to the printed college facebooks upon which the site had been modelled.  Realizing that users were updating their profile photo on an extremely frequent basis, reflecting the user’s mood, location, and current relationship, Facebook developers launched its photo-sharing feature in 2005. Today, Facebook is the biggest photo archive on the web, with 300,000,000 images uploaded every day.  What does this say about our relationship with images and their importance to our daily lives? Whilst photography is often touted as art and admired for its aesthetic and/or activist qualities, this isn’t the case for all images, suggested George Oates, former lead designer with another photo sharing service, Flickr.  Some images are more important for their social and personal connections, she explained. Launched nine years ago, Flickr photos can be explained in four layers, said Oates: you, people you know, your interests and then everything else. The former are likely to be kept private or remain within the immediate social circle, with the latter layers of photos being shared more publicly. However, one thing that breaks through all of these layers is news, and there have been many newsworthy photos uploaded to Flickr, from the now ubiquitous 7/7 photos on the London subway to photos of Paris riots and Boston snow ploughs.  Flickr’s various licensing arrangements mean that individuals’ photos can be picked up for use by worldwide news publications. The vast array of (easily searchable) photos taken on and around various incidents gives rise to contextual photography around the event – rather than one image from one agency’s photographer, you can find many different images, from many different view points, both physical and ideological. But despite some high profile news images, Flickr is still primarily full of photos of “kittens, babies, flowers and sunsets.” Not so for citizen photojournalism platform Demotix. Launched in early 2009 in the midst of a seize of Gaza, Turi Munthe’s site has always sought out those “very hard news images” rather than simply sharing personal interest photos.Set up to fill the void left by the decline of foreign bureaus and aiming to engage more people in journalism and free speech, Demotix unlike Flickr, that simply encourages the sharing of photos, is a business: selling on images and sharing the spoils 50/50 with the photographers.  By June 2009, as foreign and local media was being hounded out of the country or into silence in the wake of the failed Green Revolution in Iran, Demotix got its first image on the front page of the New York Times—an image that would not have been available without such an agency. Demotix makes efforts to verify all of the images it sells on to news outlets. Authenticity and trust are key to its success. These two aspects are valuable to others too, such as politicians—politicians who are now turning to social media, such as Facebook and Twitter to better connect with their voters. Whereas official portraits may show a stern, serious side to a leader, on Facebook he or she can show themself with their sleeves rolled up and with their family (or quite commonly with his dog, as with George W. Bush), allowing voters to see a different, more human side. Instead of ignoring or even quashing such phenomena as the internet meme, politicians are increasingly embracing them. Most worthy of note are Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio, jumping on their respective “Texts from Hillary” and water gulping bandwagons. But as politicians and celebrities strive to appear more authentic by peeling back the curtain, we the consumer, voter and viewer should still ask ourselves: what have they left out? What are they still not showing us? What public image are they trying to present? Just as there are issues in verifying the deluge of mobile phone footage appearing online covering incidents like the current Syrian civil war, more images available does not necessarily mean more authenticity.