Social Life of Snapshots

Photographs are important in many parts of our lives, and personal photographs in particular have deep and lasting importance to us. "Snapshooter" cameras revolutionized the way people remember, share histories, approach significant milestones in their lives, and create their individual, familial, and cultural identities. Now cameraphones, online sharing, and other new media are doing the same thing again. More pictures of more diverse subjects are taken more often, and for more reasons, than ever before. These pictures are reaching a wider audience who view, re-appropriate, and interact with them in sundry ways. This study describes these changes and outlines their implications, framing the discussion with concepts from the Social Construction of Technology and Activity Theory.