The Digital Image: History, Use in Social Media, and Influence PDF

9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium Member-only story The digital image– history, use in...

9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium Member-only story The digital image– history, use in Open in app social media, and its power to Search Write influence Tina Schweiger · Follow 12 min read · Jun 23, 2019 13 The digital image– history, use in social media, and it's power to influence Summary This article explores how the digital image evolved from film photography, and how the power to influence with imagery has shifted from being held by a select few to being held by nearly everyone. In the mid 1990’s to the early 2000’s, there was an upheaval in the world of image-making as film photography was turned https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 1/15 9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium upside-down by the 35mm quality digital image. With 4 billion new digital images published each day, the sheer volume of images exceeds our current technological ability to analyze digital images in a meaningful way. Before social media, images distributed by media outlets that are charged with emotion became the most iconic images of our time. Now, the digital image is a tool for good and evil and the power to wield it is in the hands of everyone. On the positive side, this article introduces the concept of a ‘contextual timestamp’ forming massive archives of our collective memory. And on the dark side, the ‘digital meme,’ that can represent pockets of hate that threaten our society in fringe web communities. How might we use the digital image as a tool for good? If we lost Facebook, would we lose ourselves? On July 25, 2018, The New York Times reported that Facebook shares fell 19%, wiping out $120B of shareholder wealth as investors learned the profits of the company would be going down due to necessary spending on security enhancements following months of scrutiny over Russian misuse of the platform in the 2016 American presidential campaign. The very nature of the technology that Facebook has created also ensures that it may be only one scandal away from its own demise. If Facebook were to fall, would we really lose ourselves? Not in the physical sense, but we would lose something that couldn’t be replaced with memory alone. We would lose a documentation of our ‘collective memory’ — groups of people that form shared memories; and memories that belong to a society as a whole. What forms the context? A look at how individual stories gain broader social currency If we take a look at a random collection of individuals’ Facebook timelines, and we find they are as unique as the human that created them. Some are quiet, with little content, some are entertaining, sharing funny narrative and images. Some are confrontational and volatile, designed to influence and spread hate. The images are often shared as part of online storytelling, not to provide accurate record of what happened in the past. Some of these images will be widely shared and spread like wildfire with millions of likes, shares, and comments, and most will fade into obscurity. A study from 2000, four years before the launch of Facebook in 2004 as “TheFacebook” of Harvard https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 2/15 9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium University studied why we in tell stories. We tell stories to induce an effect, and when we tell those stories, we will exaggerate, embellish, or dramatize in order to amuse, influence, or create a different reaction from those in our circles. The design of the Facebook post, in fact, mirrors the reasons we tell stories, providing a way to capture others’ reactions to the story in comments, categorize the emotional response it provokes, and understand how much the story resonates by seeing how much dialogue and shares it provokes. As these stories build up over time, they become a collective record of our narrative of life’s events, and how others interact with our stories form a record of the effects we’ve induced with our stories. The ‘contextual timestamp’ combines meaning and image in a bite-sized archive Facebook’s profile wall gives us the ability to look back at the images we’ve posted for as many years as we’ve been a member of the social network. The posts are ordered by date, most recent to oldest, and as you scroll down, posts get older and older, eventually hitting your first post. The date posted carries the fact of when it was posted. But what really matters is the context carried with the post — that is what can’t be reproduced in the event that we lost Facebook. https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 3/15 9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 4/15 9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium When we post images with a narrative, they can spark action. These actions encode the image with data beyond its pixels tied to a date and time, data like our friend’s reactions to the image (love, like, cry, mad, and wow), number of shares, and freeform comments and dialogue. This forms a digital trace, indicating which groups of people are connected to a specific image, and what they feel, think, and say about it. The amount of this digital context encoded with the image varies greatly — everything from a small group of people, say a closed group of a nuclear family sharing an image of a life event, to as large as millions of shares, reactions, and comments surrounding a major cultural event. This forms the ‘contextual timestamp’ that helps us place a past event in time and space. What’s important about these digital images is the context that surrounds the them, as the relationship between the image and its contextual data is what forms a richer documentation of our collective memory. Facebook shows the evolution of our group narrative and documents our collective memory through its use of a contextual timestamp. Mid 1990’s — mid 00’s: The pre-social digital image as the evolution of photography In the mid 1990’s to the early 2000’s, there was an upheaval in the world of image-making as film photography was turned upside-down by the 35mm quality digital image. Early studies of the digital image, without the context of social media, struggle to find relevance for photography in this new era. Personal photographs published online become “more public and transitory, less private and durable and more effective as objects of communication than of memory.” This study surveyed the digital image before the time of social media and identified different categories for use, including: personal and group memory, relationship creating and maintenance, self- representation, and self-expression. Without the ability for digital images to form the interactive basis for story, to capture the reactions of people and carry them with the image, digital images seemed more ephemeral than their predecessors’ film-based https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 5/15 9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium permanence. And without the platform to archive these stories and connections, most imagery was left to degrading floppy disks and zip drives. The last days of corporate-controlled digital image influence A 2006 study of digital images of the Iraq war on major news media websites begins to draw a connection between digital images and which ones become iconic, on their own, with no sharing or reactions yet possible. A study of how images of the Iraq war were published on news media websites, she surveys people on what images they remember over a 1, 2, and 3 year period, in effort to understand how images published online gain influence and staying power. As a pre-social media study, it is limited by the absence of contextual, co-creation and sharing, as is evidenced by how it cites statistics on the images in the study with reliance on web traffic and number of page views. (Traffic to an entire page on a website does not tie directly to number of views of the image.) In this study, the researcher validates older studies of journalism that find that the media outlet itself can be responsible for which images become iconic, and the story that surrounds them. I believe the Iraq war, as studied here, is one of the last major events that rely completely on heavily ‘messaged’ by corporate talking points and are delivered by one corporate group to an audience of many people. The major shift was the advent of Facebook in 2004 that gave individuals a platform to react, share, and have dialogue surrounding digital images. This is a different way of documenting our stories than has ever existed, one where context is driven from sharing and co-creating stories from person-to- person, rather than the pre-social way of sharing images that were defined, framed, and given context by a few select organizations. The images that became iconic images of our time only held the context of the media outlet that presented them. What types of images gain social currency? There is a wide spectrum of the types of images that people publish and share on social media. How much meaning and reaction the image can spark ultimately decides how likely it is to become a part of our collective story… as more eyeballs and interactions tied to an image broaden its reach and https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 6/15 9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium impressions. The speed and ease of documenting life has created a flood of banal images, especially on the platform Instagram. Endless images exist that chronicle the daily lives of “’grammers,” creating a digital commodity out of the mundane moments in life, like morning coffee and croissant or cat napping on a windowsill. Certain aspects of the higher social currency of some images over others remains the same in the socially-charged world. Photographs have historically been chosen to represent our human story because they are visual and more likely to stimulate emotion or reaction. For example, this study looks at how traumatic images of war and violence are so emotionally charged that the images themselves, rather than the facts of the past event, become defining artifacts of a culture. What’s interesting to me about this concept is that the image of an event takes on a life of its own, gaining significance as an image and becoming a social icon, while the event it documented fades into history. Another example of traumatic images forming collective memory is an article examining the images posted on two different Facebook groups created by survivors of the 1976 fall of the Palestinian Tal al-Za’tar refugee camp and their descendants. This study showcases the impact of images within Facebook of a group-specific, geographically specific event that https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 7/15 9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium happened in the past. These Facebook groups have a common shared past trauma and shared geography. It found that the stories tended to oversimplify history, the images became objects of the ritualization of mourning, and the platform allowed younger people first-hand access to accounts and conversations with those who were there. It found that “The new capabilities of online technology (new access to information and images, the malleability of digital images, the social features of Facebook, etc.) play a crucial role in how images are circulated, interpreted and repurposed, and affect understandings of authorship and the mobilization and articulation of memory.” From social currency to inspiring action: the power of the image to move people to action From visual expression, to communication, to provocative storytelling, images that are shared en masse and with context have proven to have the ability to drive behavior. Consider a ‘visually prominent’ image of the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe. Combining a current event that has happened during a mature social media era, a 2018 study by Lin Prøitz looked at the impact of the image of Alan Kurdi, a deceased three-year-old boy on a Turkish beach, and how young people responded to the crisis in Oslo and Sheffield. The obvious difference in the study is the accessibility of data that https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 8/15 9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium shows how widespread the story has become. “Within 12 hours, the image had been tweeted 30,000 times and reached the screens of 20 million people worldwide.” Why this image? This study shows that people were responding to the condition of the boy’s body, and position in which he laid… and unmarred, perfect three-year-old, appearing to be sleeping on the beach. In effect, this image quickly reached iconic status — in lightning speed as compared to 20th century mass media distribution. An example of one image that became iconic in the 1970’s, and carried over to today’s social media environment is “Accidental Napalm” image of a young girl running away from a Vietnam war attach, burning from napalm. In fact, this image has formed the basis for an ever-evolving series of social dialogue known as the ‘digital meme.’ From image to symbol: the created, referenced, bastardized, and evolving meme The ‘viral’ quality of images, or how much they are shared, are indicators of how likely these images will become iconic, or take on a life of their own as a symbol of something bigger than the event they documented. Activation of images in social media create visual symbols that drive action in the present. When combined with phrases, these become memes. Memes as image snippets are hyper-changing images that evolve faster than the content of our stories. These images have the power to spread hate, and in some cases, become the symbols of hate groups that cause racial violence in society today. https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 9/15 9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium Most digital memes originate on fringe web communities like Reddit, /pol, and 4chan. Because of their simple, compact design, memes decrease the time for cognitive processing and increase the speed at which images can be produced. The most current studies analyze the meme from two different angles — one follows one meme as it evolves and changes over time, and the other analyzes over 160,000,000 images in an effort to begin forming categories for understanding this phenomenon. In a 2018 study the authors choose the image of the Obama “Hope Poster” by Shepard Fairey and follow it as it morphs and evolves over time to encapsulate various meanings. This study distinguished three categories for the purpose of memes: games, political commentary, or cultural evolution. It documents how the Hope Meme was change into a Fear Meme by Obama’s political adversaries, and that the Hybrid Meme that combined the Joker with Obama became a symbol for anarchism, socialism, communism, and even fascism. An important note, the authors call for more studies and analysis because of the massive amount of data, “it is easy for the researcher to become quickly overwhelmed.” In June 2018, only weeks before Facebook lost 19% of its value, a group of researchers published an in-progress study of a dataset of 160M images from 2.6B posts gathered from Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and Know Your Meme over https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 10/15 9/8/24, 4:35 PM The digital image– history, use in social media, and its power to influence | by Tina Schweiger | Medium the course of 13 months. While many memes are created for ironic or humorous purposes, this study explores the depths of hate that can spread through fringe web communities, looking at some of the most shared and politicized memes. This study looks at Donald Trump’s 2015 tweet of a “Pepe the Frog” popular meme and identifies the purpose of creating and spreading hateful memes as a form of “attention hacking.” The study attempts to identify how memes evolve, if their influence can be measured, if variants of memes can be studied, and if you can characterize a web community by the memes it circulates. Ultimately, sharing images on social media has created a world where fear and hate can wield enormous influence on the world stage. This study’s purpose is to begin to understand this hate, categorize it, and get out ahead of it. “Moreover, our pipeline can already be used by social network providers to assist the identification of hateful content; for instance, Facebook is already taking steps to ban Pepe the Frog used in the context of hate, and our methodology can help them automatically identify hateful variants.” Conclusion Much like Gutenberg’s printing press, that gave people the power of mass communication and sparked the renaissance, the digital image powered by social media gives everyone the power to provoke change in society. What new era are we sparking now? A new era of change for good, like the fundraising outcome of the viral image of Alan Kurdi’s tragic body on a beach? An evolving positive expression of collective creativity like Obama’s Hope Poster? We need to get on top of real-time image data processing as soon as possible. Because the digital image has evolved into a powerful tool that’s at the fingertips of nearly every member of society, and we need to know what’s rising to the top. If possible, real-time image monitoring can allow for society to gain insight into fringe communities that can house violent tendencies, use images to spark violent actions, and in a very circular way, inspire actual real-world violence that causes the creation of new images of violence, that can unfortunately become the future iconic images in our culture. Losing Facebook, unfortunately, may be the least of our worries. https://medium.com/p/249a2e0d0d1c 11/15