It is argued that in contrast to the Kodak culture, where a small group of persons (friends and family) share oral stories around images with others, the digital new culture of the image on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, is one where a large-scaled conversation is shared with people that participants don’t know in real life.
That large-scaled conversation shared with people used to be the case with Flickr, but it is less so know. Flickr’s key strengths are seen as photo sharing and storage. Around 2005/2006 it was the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. There was the social sharing which used to be quite active in a community sense because Flickr was a place where people who took photography more seriously went.
No longer. The impact of the mobile phone has meant that people tick the ‘like’ button for an particular image, rather than comment or engage in a large scale conversation on other people’s photos. I used to engage in the conversations but with Yahoo’s recent (2013) revamp/redesign of Flickr I more or less drop an image into my photo stream and run. The new style Flickr represents a “sea change” in its purpose. Continue reading “in Melbourne: thinking about Flickr”
