Visual social media

The moment of birth was once the instant where parents and others first saw their child in the world, but with the advent of various imaging technologies, most notably the ultrasound, the first photos often precede birth (Lupton, 2013). In the past several decades, the question is no longer just when the first images are produced, but who should see them, via which, if any, communication platforms? Should sonograms (the ultrasound photos) be used to announce the impending arrival of a new person in the world? Moreover, while that question is ostensibly quite benign, it does usher in an era where parents and loved ones are, for the first years of life, the ones deciding what, if any, social media presence young people have before they’re in a position to start contributing to those decisions.

This chapter addresses this comparatively new online terrain, postulating the provocative term intimate surveillance, which deliberately turns surveillance on its head, begging the question whether sharing affectionately, and with the best of intentions, can or should be understood as a form of surveillance. Firstly, this chapter will examine the idea of co-creating online identities, touching on some of the standard ways of thinking about identity online, and then starting to look at how these approaches do and do not explicitly address the creation of identity for others, especially parents creating online identities for their kids. I will then review some ideas about surveillance and counter-surveillance with a view to situating these creative parental acts in terms of the kids and others being created. Finally, this chapter will explore several examples of parental monitoring, capturing and sharing of data and media about their children, using various mobile apps, contextualising these activities not with a moral finger-waving, but by surfacing specific questions and literacies which parents may need to develop in order to use these tools mindfully, and ensure decisions made about their children’s’ online presences are purposeful decisions.

'How do people communicate through photographic digital memes by looking?' This chapter focuses on this question and considers the state of literature about the idea of looking as an everyday communicative practice. The literature review begins by briefly outlining traditional models of looking that are still common in academic discussion. These models are also important in locating social media within a history because, as Nancy Baym (2009, p.180-181) has pointed out, the first key element of quality research is connecting and locating the project within history. I then define and situate key terms and proposals for considering social photographic practices. Close examination of the literature suggests that traditional models of the ways in which people interact visually require updating to recognise interaction and the movement of visual social interactions. I suggest that the idea of the movement of social interactions captures the flexible contexts of viewing in the digital public sphere and the ways in which the activities of viewer, subject and photographer are often blurred and unfixed, as well as the agency that is attached to these activities. Drawing on Angela Thomas' (2007) argument that identity online is performed by self, community and others, I suggest that the ways in which we practice looking in online contexts might also be examined from these three perspectives. A model of looking adequate for discussing participatory culture needs to include looking as performed by the producer, viewer and subject and to acknowledge that these roles are in constant movement. Movement includes the..................

As camera phones become more commonplace in the rise of UCC technologies, as highlighted by many of the papers in this special issue, the ways in which the personal are negotiated through the public and private are being transformed. The politics of self-presentation, self-portraiture, and self-expression feature within all the papers; however, in each cultural context, we see how these politics of the personal has different impacts upon political debate. Far from mere narcissism, we see that these practices are part of broader media literacy and etiquette.