Social Media as a Photographic Technology

There is a constant dispute in regards to the pro’s and con’s of social media and if it promotes “real photography”, or just 12-year-old white girls spamming us with their Starbucks and acai breakfast bowls. However, whether you agree with, and enjoy the idea of social media or not, it has undeniably become an essential tool for photographers to utilise in the modern day, and has definitively changed the way in which we create images and distribute our photographic works.

The first recognizable social media site, called ‘Six Degrees’, was created in 1997. It was a website that allowed users to upload a profile and make friends with other people using the site. In 1999, the first blogging site became popular, creating a social media sensation that is still relevant today. After the invention of blogging, social media started to explode and sites

like ‘MySpace’ and ‘LinkedIn’ gained prominence in the early 2000s. Sites like Photobucket and Flickr assisted in online photo sharing. By 2006, Facebook and Twitter were available to people all around the globe. These sites remain some of the most popular social networks on the Internet and today, there are a tremendous variety of social networking sites, many of which can be linked to allow cross-posting. This creates an environment where users are able to reach the maximum number of people, without sacrificing the intimacy of person-to-person communication. Or you can broadcast your images to a vast audience without having to communicate with a single person.

This rise of image-led social media has opened up a whole new realm of exhibition for photographers. Unlike in a gallery or print publication, photographic work published on these platforms are able to reach a much larger audience. But, in the absence of a curator or editor, photographers are tasked with making a selection of their own work and the choice of how to organise and caption their images is entirely up to them.

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