Book of the week

Nathan Jurgenson : The Social Photo - On Photography and Social Media

Photo: amazon.com

By spreading social media platforms our relation to photos and pictures changed in two ways (essentially). On one hand, by the expansion of the alternatives and customs of picture making (to take photos) there are changes in the types (or sorts) of pictures we take, of what we take pictures and whom we share them with. On the other hand, correlating with the previous statement, we got accustomed to the situation that there are lots of visual information around us, we meet them day by day. 

According to the author of the Book of the week this change should be approached not from the history or theory of arts (from the aspects of pictures)  but by the range of interpretation originated from social theory. 
The central idea of the book ’The Social Photo’ (2019) by Nathan Jurgenson is 'digital dualism'; criticism of the theory that the internet is an independent virtual thing - it is not a real one. By Jurgenson's idea our thinking alters due to the use of internet and social media even if we are not 'logged in', that is where 'mechanical' and 'human' are interwoven.

He says the followings in a lecture (the link is at the end of the text):

„Social media gives us a different perspective on the world. [...] To me that was very close to what people called the ’camera eye’ a century ago: if you take a lot of pictures, you know what the camera eye is [...] even when you put the camera down, you see the image [...]. You’re seeing through the mechanism of the camera, even when you don’t have the camera with you. [...]. So social media I thought was giving us kind of the same thing. What people were doing with cameras was [...] the busiest intersection of the material and the technological that I could think of.”

(After the library is reopened, the volumes of the book reviews uploaded on Mondays will be available in Free Access Area, at the table marked "New Foreign Books on Sociology".  Relevant regulations can be seen on library website:  http://fszek.hu/)

Sources and more readings (and a website to see):

Quoted lecture and book review : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOg4Ocptjyw

Author's website: https://nathanjurgenson.com/