The Visual in Social Media: understanding visual objects, mobilities, and practices.

“In smartphone photography, often immediately posted in social media, it would be easy to assume that reality has simply been ‘captured’ in this way and can be interpreted on that basis. A current example of this would be with novel visual objects such as ‘screenshots’ that are becoming routine communicative forms, including the production of ‘stills’ from TikTok videos. These are often interpreted as directly evidential ‘documents’ but have only very recently been subject to critical scholarly analysis (see Frosh, 2019).”
“the image is an evidential document of something else (communities, identities, events, locations), where on the other hand, the image is more like an inter-textual site of discursive relationships. Both approaches may treat images as representational or pictorial forms, meaning that images are taken to represent something regardless of whether this is thought to ‘mirror’ or ‘construct’ that object.”
“makes social media images radically ‘unstable’, presenting difficulties of knowing ‘what’ and ‘where’ the image is in a dynamic ‘looping’ environment (see Highfield and Leaver, 2016).”
“different forms of ‘decay’, The dynamic of ‘persistence’ and ‘potential’ is especially important for interpretations of visual memory in social media (Hand 2016, 2020). As a consequence, social media researchers have to think about what specific images ‘do’ socially over time and through space and how this might be accessed and assessed.”
“It is a common statement that, say, tweets are often ‘taken out of context’, but there is an important point here about the importance, methodologically, to know what the context of an image is. The dynamic combinations of people, infrastructures, devices, and platforms that form the sites of image production and consumption are not always easily identifiable as a stable media ‘ensemble’ (see Hepp, 2020). ”
“There is a distinctive challenge in being able to identify the ‘sites’ of a social media image in relatively stable terms, especially as social media allows for the re-emergence of visual forms in new contexts (e.g., an older image re-tagged and brought back into circulation, where it will be ‘seen in a new light’). For example, an object as simple as a hash-tagged Instagram image is being redistributed across other platforms and is subject to ongoing re-composition and re-audiencing via devices, each of which may also involve the additional of new visual symbolic markers such as emojis, likes, comments, and tags. With iconic images – and at the time of writing this might be those images associated with the U.S. capitol riots, or tragic experiences of hospitalization during the global pandemic – it is often the multiplication of sites of viewing and ‘meme-ification’ through social media that appears to ascribe affective ‘amplified’ power to the image. This might include the use of memes in political engagement and activism (see Frazer and Carlson, 2017)”
“Accordingly, much visual social media research focuses upon the modes of classification – hashtags that form temporary ‘publics’, say – rather than a close reading of the visual content or more significantly perhaps the contingencies of multiple and dynamic audience interpretations. ”
“the apparent circulation of the ‘same’ image through different material contexts (e.g., phone, platform, screen, feed) shaped by algorithmic processes presents intractable problems of identifying multiplying audiences, the sites of viewing and interpretation, and therefore the ‘ways of looking’ crucial to understanding meaning (Hartley, 2012). One approach has been to focus on the vast numbers of visual objects but try to map patterns in what is being made visible and shared ‘locally’”
“Try and understand the contexts of interpretation among users – how visual objects are being made, viewed and shared, but also how such objects are ‘performative’ in particular settings (Pink, et al. 2015).”
with ubiquitous cameras, “qualitative interpretive researchers are faced with the embedding of visual data within multiple uses and diverse practices that are not necessarily ‘photographic’”
often thick descriptions in domestic settings
“as part of a broader ‘de-centering’ of the digital within ‘digital ethnography’ (see Pink, et al. 2015).”
“how to understand ongoing forms of production, viewing, and appropriation.”
“Zappavigna and Zhao (2020) show how ‘ambient publics’ are produced through ‘object’ selfies (such as coffee cups) as these are circulated and recontextualized through social media platforms”
mixed-method approach of the kind employed by Pink et. al. (2015) as part of a ‘digital ethnography’, in which visual resources are used as elements of method. It would explore people’s reflexive engagements with devices and varieties of visual data, seeking to avoid any analytic separation of that data from the devices through which it is produced and circulated (e.g., Hand, 2014; 2016)
digital images ‘potential for unlimited re-classification, malleability, transience, and potential persistence.”
“other cases, such as ‘screenshots’, emojis, and so on, established approaches are not so easily translated” to traditional methodology
“researchers are faced with difficult problems of trying to bring together all three of these complex elements –objects, contexts, and practices – in rich interpretive studies.”
“We know quite a lot about the kinds of visual objects that appear in social media and are beginning to understand how these are often problematically ‘automatically’ structured and classified. There are fascinating developments in mixed and multimodal methods that seek to address problems of research into visual platforms that ignore the visual and into visual social media that ignore the complexities of multiple interpretations of visual data. “

insights on method

“Without attention to the visual content, in-depth interviewing potentially ignores compositional and technological issues, rarely moving beyond localized contexts that arguably miss the more challenging aspects of mobilities and compositional issues described above.”
analyse images as ” a particular image or compositional genre, focusing on the surface qualities of the visual object. Methods here tend to be close reading, content, semiotic and/or discourse analyse”
or Critical discourse analyses
soliciting photos or interviewing on existing digital assemblages - allow you reflect in a new way