“identify”-ing a new way of seeingcinema.usc.edu/assets/098/15848.pdf · a desktop computer,...

Rethinking the Amateur: Acts of Media Production in the Digital AgeBroderick Fox, editor, Spectator 24:1 (Spring 2004) 65-79.

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In November 2002, web designer Adam Greenfield, coined the term ‘moblogging’.1 Derived from ‘mobile’ and ‘weblog’, ‘moblogging’ indicated a shift, the emergence of a distinctive trend in weblogging (also known as blogging), a form of electronic journaling on the internet in which a person logs his/her thoughts and provides links to other sites to which others can respond and contribute. The prefix ‘mo-’, an abbreviation of ‘mobile’, redefined the character of blog journaling as it had been practiced previously.2 Whereas blogging required a stationary point of access to the web, usually a desktop computer, moblogging happens on-the-go. With mobile screenic device (MSD)—such as a camera phone or PDA with imaging capabilities—in hand, one can move about the city or other places and “post [his/her] experiences, narratively and visually, on a shared message board.”3 Crucial to this activity is the ability to upload information from a MSD to a website, which means that any place is a possible site of transmission of text and image. The moblogs that grow out of such engagements between a person

and a place via his/her MSD provide access to not only a person’s running commentary regarding his/her daily interactions but also, and more important to this essay, images that correspond to the way s/he sees the world around him/her.4

A particular moblog of interest is “Identify Game” located at the Textamerica website (identify.textamerica.com). Like the other moblogs hosted by Textamerica (as well as other moblogs on the web), “Identify Game” posts images uploaded from MSDs and invites comments, or in the case of “Identify Game,” guesses, from visitors about the images. However, the images posted to “Identify Game” are substantially different from the majority of those posted to other moblogs; they demonstrate a particular and extreme example of the imaging that MSDs foster. Typical images that appear on ordinary moblogs are of smiles and grimaces of friends, family and passers-by, the leisurely reclining pet peering through lazy eyes, even the orchestration and color of various food items at a restaurant or on a local fruit stand. These are framed images that provide

Metal filings? Ice crystals on a bathroom window? A passing Tyrannosaurus rex?

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“Identify”-ing A New Way of SeeingAmateurs, Moblogs, and Practices in Mobile Imaging

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“IDENTIFY”-ING A NEW WAY OF SEEING

a context to which can be ascribed a meaning or interpretation: they function through their legibility. As such, they are images that are reminiscent of (although not the same as) amateur tourist photos, snapped in the moment of ephemeral pleasures, to be read at a later time. Unlike these views of the everyday that appear on ordinary moblogs, what appears on “Identify Game” are sundry glimpses of everyday objects—images that are relatively illegible. By ‘glimpses’ I mean partial views, or what, in cinematic terms, might be considered extreme close-ups or canted angles of ordinary things.5 In fact, the moblog’s invocation to post explicitly requests such images; its description line reading, “Send an abstract picture of a common object and see if anyone can guess what it is.” The point of the game is to see playfully, i.e., to image the ordinary in ways that surprise and, thereby, trouble reading, as can be seen in the numerous attempts made by site visitors to identify the images. In response, people with mobile picture phones and PDAs with imaging capabilities regularly post images of hardly recognizable items that they happen upon during the course of the day. The images that have been posted thus far tend to be of the unusual details of things; they are images of textures and peculiarities, surfaces and flaws, obscure angles and distortions.

What is significant about this phenomenon, as it materializes on “Identify Game,” is that it invites us to (re)consider established notions of and expectations for imaging, which may still be informed largely by assumptions that privilege the aesthetics of print photography, in which legibility is fundamental. A site such as “Identify Game,” then, demands that we engage images differently and, by extension, approach them with their specificities in mind. As such, it calls upon us to think about the people who take and post these images and the technologies with which they do so. Likewise, it asks us to attend to the implications of such activities. Perhaps the following questions provide a point of departure for such considerations: How might the imaging practices, as exhibited on “Identify Game,” be

related to issues of the amateur, past amateur practice , and new (amateur) technologies? In what ways do these images require that we revise our conceptions about documents and documentation? Finally, how might we come to understand such images as indications of a new way of seeing? This article is envisioned as an initial response to these questions, and it is an invitation for further conversation regarding the very peculiar images that appear on “Identify Game” and in less concentrated form on other moblogs on the web.

The Amateur and Mobile Screenic Devices (MSDs)

Since MSD imaging is a practice of presumably everyday people, it seems appropriate in their contemplation and theorization, to turn to considerations of the amateur.6 In fact, the term ‘amateur’ surfaces periodically in relation to discussions about MSDs and the images they produce. Usually such discussions refer to the ways in which MSDs serve as devices for news reportage (e.g., providing real-time images of natural disasters and traffic conditions), as well as the fact that they multiply the promise of amateur video as a tool for activism and ‘new surveillance’ (e.g., circulating images of political upheavals; making visible what authorized accounts might conceal); less frequently, they align MSDs with individual creativity and artistic expression and, therefore, amateur photography (e.g., capturing the red glow of a sunset).7 Certainly, MSD imaging practices may, in fact, replicate those aligned with amateur video and photography, which tend to involve preserving a personal, or at least a personalized, view of some thing, event, or person. However, the analogies that are constructed as a result may be misleading, for these devices and the ways in which they are used do not so much reinforce former notions of amateurism as open them up.

Historically, notions of amateurism have operated in tandem with those of professionalism. As Patricia R. Zimmermann

67RETHINKING THE AMATEUR

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A sample round of Identify Game posted on 3/21/04 by user “jaybudder.”

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indicates, amateurism and professionalism are categories that function symbiotically to perpetuate social relations determined by capitalism.8 Within this system, the amateur, coincident with leisure and the private, is set in opposition to the professional, aligned with work (i.e., wage-labor) and the public. The individual as amateur engages his/her activities during leisure time and often within the context of or in relation to the nuclear family.9 The nuclear family simultaneously provides a place of refuge from the demands and divisiveness of the public sphere and functions as a site of containment, whereby the freedom and expression ascribed to the amateur as individual are re-routed.

Camera in hand, the amateur records key images that will ensure ‘good’ memories, images which, as Michelle Citron enumerates, include “having fun on vacation, children with animals, families that play or celebrate together.”10 In the process, s/he reproduces expected narratives, which never pose any challenge to the expertise, rationalization and control of the professional, corporate sphere.

At the same time, commercial discourse promotes ever improving professional-quality technologies to amateurs, whose footage will potentially be purchased by news stations or shown on television shows such as America’s Funniest Home Videos. Here, the amateur is professionalized (though not professional); s/he produces footage that is incorporated

into the professional sphere—but only to the extent that the containment of the amateur is effectively achieved. That is, the amateur never (completely) disrupts the conventional codes that govern and perpetuate the dominant mode of representation.

But MSDs trouble the structuring binaries that inform conventional notions of the amateur. Insofar as they have Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) capabilities that allow images to be sent from mobile phone or PDA to friends and family (i.e., their mobile phones and e-inboxes) or uploaded to moblogs, MSDs invite people to engage in imaging at all times of the day, in and from any location whatsoever. As such, they problematize the categorizing binaries of work/play and public/private. Leisure time, a function of play and private, does not operate to describe and domesticate the imaging that MSDs produce; the pretense of hobby (which emerges as an articulation of play and private) no longer disguises the processes of socializing at work in amateur activities.

Additionally, the boundary between professional and amateur is dismantled. Professional does not exist in direct opposition to amateur; instead, the line delineating the two has been blurred. Those who participate in imaging with MSDs are hyphenated: amateur-professionals and professional-amateurs. Now the professional


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includes everyday business people such as real estate agents, construction workers, salespeople of various kinds, as well as surgeons and emergency medical technicians, all of whom use MSDs for purposes of clarification, demonstration, verification and consultation.11

The speed and ease at which image can be exchanged—in effect distributed—is unprecedented in the history of amateur photographic practice, where access to distribution has long been one of the greatest terms of distinction between amateur and professional media. Such development diminishes the professional category’s claim to expertise and specialization (at least, as the terms pertain to the domain of image production); it means that the category no longer connotes the same privilege and separation it once did.12 Likewise, amateur undergoes revision, insofar as anyone who has a MSD is always already a potential embedded reporter for various broadcast and print news organizations and, therefore, cannot be relegated to and contained by the private sphere.13

Although MSDs dismantle the amateur-professional binary as it has functioned with respect to representational practices of photography and video, we cannot dispose of the amateur altogether—especially since the term still circulates. Instead we must revise it, or recontextualize it. Doing so

requires a return to the site of undoing, where the categories of amateur and professional dissolve. What remains is a commonality of practice: the imaging that typifies MSD use is informed by a will or desire to document. As a result, people using MSDs as imaging devices produce images that presume a certain legibility (often fraught with ideological undertones regarding issues of indexicality and authenticity). That is, there is an underlying motivation to ensure that the images are readable for others so that they acquire an exchange value as proof or evidence.14 As such, they perpetuate a dominant mode of representation which depends upon framing and contextualization. In contrast, “Identify Game” points to MSD-produced images that subvert the investment in legibility upon which documentation is premised.15

The Document and Illegibility

Documentation assumes transparency, insofar as it proceeds according to the expectation that the document preserves something that is or has been real and that the document’s existence can make that something recognizable as such. This expectation is based on a principle of indexicality: the document is a trace of the previous actuality of something, and therefore, what it presents

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has authenticity and truth value. The project of documentation depends upon this privileged status of the document in order to inform, to prove, and to remember (from the root docere) what has been. However, this project is itself neither transparent nor innocent, since it simultaneously functions according to disciplinary processes that aim to make proper and/or contain (from the root decere) both what is documented and those to whom the document is presented.16

Photographic images provide an obvious example of this dual function. According to Roy Ascott, the photographic image traditionally participates in “routines of seeing” in which viewers are trained to see photographic reality as synonymous with ordinary reality.17 Photographs are accepted as conveying (authentic and accurate) visual information and/or proof about a depicted reality, which conform to accepted codes of photographic representation.

Promotional discourses for camera phones and PDAs with imaging capabilities hinge on the premise that MSD images function as photographic documents, insofar as they posit imaging as evidentiary. The MSD, often a camera phone, provides the visual demonstration for what is being spoken, e.g., “I see what you’re saying.” A brief overview of a current marketing campaign for Sprint PCS mobile phones and cellular service illustrates the ways in which MSDs are constructed

as devices whose imaging capabilities are designed to “prove it,” as in the case of the grown man who employs a Sprint phone to evidence the existence of the monster in his closet.18 But often the mechanism of proof is coded in terms that are complicit with notions of sharing.19 For example, in Sprint’s “You Love Him” commercial, a young woman messages her friend, stating, “Check this out.” The image she sends shows a young man, the recipient’s “new boyfriend,” whose mouth is filled with hamburger and face smeared with ketchup. The commercial cuts to the Sprint logo and signature bouncing pin, at which point a voiceover urges, “Share it when it happens.”20 The value of the camera phone, according to most print advertisements and commercials, resides in its ability to record those rare because momentary happenings; the spontaneity of any situation is never lost with a camera phone in hand.

But the objective of imaging is sending the images one records to someone. As indicated by a majority of cellular service providers (in the US), one images in order to share.21 In being aligned with sharing, imaging as evidencing is coincident with interpersonal relations and community building. The call to “snap and share,” to borrow a phrase from the Verizon Wireless website, implicitly requires that MSD users share images that are recognizable to others. Often these images rehearse familiar scenes, such as birthdays


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and visits to amusement parks, and, as such, bear a resemblance to photographs aligned with past traditions of amateur photography.22 Ultimately, interpersonal relations, as facilitated by MSDs with imaging capabilities, are synonymous with a shared way of seeing, which privileges legibility.

In contrast, the images that are posted to “Identify Game” epitomize an alternative way of seeing and imaging (in relation to) one’s surroundings with their representations of the minute and the tangential, e.g., a shot of the vent holes of a Mac G3 monitor, as well as a close up of a USB thumbdrive. I contend that these images that appear on “Identify Game” provide an opportunity to reconsider accepted notions of document and documentation. In certain respects, these images might even be seen as refusing (or at least problematizing) what might be understood as their putative function as documents, primarily because they do not heed photographic convention. The images are without context and are fragmentary in what they represent; they defy conventions of photographic composition that typically characterize amateur imaging. Traditional forms of framing and centering are not fundamental to these images, and the extreme close-up seems the shot distance of choice. Additionally, blurring occurs frequently—not to mention a tendency toward lack of focus.

One might assert that these images incite surprise in both content and form, but this surprise makes recognition—legibility—of anything in the image difficult at best. In essence, these images do not inform or explain;

they foreclose summative narrativization (which is proper to and property of the document). Additionally, these images tend to lack resolution; their grainy quality speaks to a texture of experience, not the pursuit of demonstrating the noteworthy or depicting a story. (Although, this last point is fast becoming less relevant, given continuing advances in technology.) It is difficult to interpret these images as taking account of or ordering that which is imaged; these images seem less involved in a mode of representation that, in Heideggerian terms, produces the world as picture.23 Seemingly, neither the images themselves nor that which they represent become a function of usefulness per se; in which case, they do not simply comprise a standing-reserve out of which a narrative or history can be configured.To the extent that these images invoke surprise, they recall other images that appear elsewhere on the web and under less contrived conditions. Because these other images are not directly solicited (as are the images on “Identify Game”) and yet appear consistently (albeit sporadically) on various moblogs on the web, they allow us to position the images on “Identify Game” within a broader context of practice. For the most part, other moblogs are host to predominately legible images, among which illegible images crop up intermittently. For example, an image of blurred blue, salmon, and white appears between a shot from a street (presumably from inside an automobile) and an indoor office scene (medium.rarewindow.com); its title reads, “Shot out of car window,” which

Images from medium.rarewindow.com, www.easterwood.org, and ashleyarcher.textamerica.com.

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does little to clarify what appears within the image’s borders. Likewise, a swirl of sparks punctuates a series of traditional images of smiling friends embracing each other (ashleyarcher.textamerica.com). Or, a row of feet belonging to two (and a half) pairs of bended knees interrupts a long column of tourist and family images (www.easterwood.org). Within the context of their respective moblog pages, such illegible images constitute instances of rupture at the same time that they puzzle the eye; they pierce through the otherwise prosaic documentation of everyday life legible in the images surrounding them. In part, the sporadic occurrence of such images accounts for this disjunction.24 But there is something more to these images.

In other venues, I have argued that such (what I am calling here) ‘illegible’ images produced by MSDs can be interpreted as traces of various moments of encounter; that is, they might be said to be fragments of once on-going interactions with the world, interactions that seem to have exceeded both frame (as defined by the images’ edges) and label (as might be provided by captions or titles).25 As fragments, images such as these become something more than photographs: they are not merely representations that bear the burden of indexicality in a traditional photographic way and they do more than abide by the codes of realism in a manner

expected of photographs proper and as traditionally (re)produced by amateur imaging practices. And yet, they do present evidence—as photographic fragments of moments of what I call seeing-imaging. What this means is that they are residual yet concrete artifacts, which are themselves indexes, in addition to their representations being indexes. To attend to the documentary status of such images requires reading the two orders of indexicality together. For not only do the images point to the having-been-there of the objects/people represented but also the having-been of a particular moment and manner of seeing. They gesture toward and make record of both the happening/existence of a particular engagement and the process of seeing-imaging of that engagement.

What I am asserting here with regard to the process of seeing-imaging that MSDs foster is strikingly different than what is usually attributed to amateur photographic (and filmmaking) practices and technologies. While discourses surrounding and perpetuating amateurism define amateur images, e.g., snapshots, in terms of their “naiveté in regards to…formal [i.e., professional] systems of visual language” (among other things), they do not conceive of the practices themselves as a manner of seeing.26 The informal, novice visual style of amateur photos, which propagates an ideologically homogenized notion of private images (both in content


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and form), is understood as operating at the level of representation; it in no way indicates a particular practice of seeing, much less as it might transpire via an imaging technology such as the camera. Even when Susan Sontag explains that photography “is a device for experiencing” or when she asserts that “picture-taking is an event in itself,” her claims fall short of what I am proposing here in arguing that imaging with a MSD is, in fact, a part of everyday acts of seeing.27 Of course, this phenomenon has something to do with the fact that the portability and instantaneity of current imaging technologies make possible the simultaneity—and integration—of imaging and seeing. The illegibility of the resulting images of seeing-imaging, therefore, is not merely an aspect of a visual style but, in fact, a material record of a visual process in its happening.

To place the images of “Identify Game” in relation to the illegible images on other moblogs is to posit a comparable process of vision and, consequently, an analogous form of encounter between MSD user and his/her surroundings. In this way, the images posted to “Identify Game” might also be understood as indexical fragments of particular experiences of seeing-imaging (even as such engagements may not be as spontaneous given the possibility that they might, in fact, emerge as direct responses to the moblog’s call for images). As with other

moblog images, those on “Identify Game” demonstrate that seeing-imaging transpires in relation to everyday objects, mundane things—the incidental. The point of meeting between two Legos, the spiraled threads of a tassel, or the curvature of a copier start button all potentially foster encounter. And the illegibility of the resulting images speaks to the spontaneity of encounter, even as the call for such images may imply otherwise.

Also important to consider are the exchanges that transpire in the guessing of each image that appears on “Identify Game.” The various attempts to ‘identify’ what an image pictures correspond to the degree of illegibility borne by the image. Frequently, several guesses are required before the image is accurately identified—or at least an approximate guess is considered close enough to count as correct. In some cases, the guesses number two or three, while for more obscure images more than twenty guesses may be required (in which case, clues, though almost as enigmatic as the image, are often provided). The guesses made are generally friendly and sometimes playful but almost always concise, and when the correct guess appears, very little, if any, explanation of the object is provided. That is, no story is generated; no one asks anything more about the image or the object. The string of exchanges terminates (without denouement). Ultimately, the pleasure is in guessing at the

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image itself, not in any related narrative. But the playful banter reveals something more: for example, that an unrecognized object can simultaneously seem a helmet, an earring, a hair clip, a fishing lure, a brush, a cap, the back side of a chair and an ear—and yet be none of these.28 The images on “Identify Game” emphasize the disjunction between the image, what it pictures and how it is seen. They do so by performing a hyperbolized illegibility, which ultimately underscores the relative illegibility of all photographic documents (or perhaps all documents). We can never really say what any document actually (re)presents, since recognition always presupposes literacy in the discourses that govern legibility: to be able to read a document, visual or written, is to be literate in the codes that constitute it. If this is the case, then it might be that “Identify Game” provides training in a new way of seeing, at the same time that it calls into question the dominant mode of seeing, which is perpetuated by conventional photographic documents, including those associated with amateurism.

Evidence of a New Way of Seeing

While the images of “Identify Game” speak to the possibility of calling into question the assumptions accorded to documentary practices as they pertain to photographic

representation, I do not propose to deny these images all documentary status or value. While it is possible that they are not documents in a traditional sense, it seems that the images that appear on “Identify Game,” as well as those that remain after potentially less contrived moments of seeing-imaging, are likely to participate in constructing history in some way—that they, as by-products, preserve something of a past that might produce historical understanding.29

Perhaps, it becomes a matter of attending to the minute details that are recognizable, e.g., textures, expressions, incongruities, etc. that comprise the everyday, and reading those visual details with and against any accompanying text (be it title/label, personal reflection, or visitor response). Perhaps, it becomes a matter of identifying patterns and/or tendencies that recur across images accumulating on moblog pages as well as in image files to which MSD images are saved. But it is also a matter of acknowledging that these images are traces of a particular mode of seeing heretofore not fostered by other amateur imaging technologies. As such, they might be said to be records of a particular experience of space and a corresponding sense of the world, as Erwin Panofsky and others have explained with respect to the modern perspectival mode of seeing that emerged in Western Europe during the Renaissance (and which has persisted as the


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dominant and colonizing mode of vision in the Anglo-West).30

For Panosfky, modern perspective transforms psychophysiological space into geometric space, which reduces the texture and substance of reality to homogeneous and abstract functionality; it coincides with a mathematical and supposedly objective, rational seeing.31 Seeing engendered by this systematic construction of space propels positivistic accounts and representations of the world. Such practices of seeing function according to calculation and quantifiability. Panofsky makes clear that perspectival seeing is not inherent to human perception of space, which he supposes to be heterogeneous and rooted in the phenomenological. Rather, as Panofsky explains, our modern vision has undergone “habituation—further reinforced by looking at photographs”—and I would argue, by taking photographs.32

Our way of seeing, having grown accustomed to linear perspective, adheres to normalized cues or patterns, which standardize our observations and abstract us from our seeing. As such, we attend to but do not engage our surroundings—due in part to varying degrees of haste and/or preoccupation (facilitated by processes of standardization in other areas of our existence). We resort to words such as “objective” and “logical”—and “normal”—to describe this relationship to the world. We snap images that chronicle

or narrativize events and scenes—which themselves comply with predetermined, socially constructed assumptions regarding what is proper to an ‘event’ or a ‘scene’, and which are usually sustained through discourses organizing practices ascribed to amateurs. We frame and pose our subjects, so that the subsequent images correspond to traditional photographic (and often commercial) representations. This is precisely what (potentially) changes in the seeing-imaging fostered by MSDs, as evidenced by the images posted to “Identify Game” and other moblogs.

The images that accumulate and circulate as a result of seeing-imaging with MSDs register a shift in mode of perception. The images that appear on moblogs, including “Identify Game,” counter the systematic, rectilinear organization of space that informs and corresponds to a modern perspectival seeing, which disregards and, consequently, relegates to the status of invisible that which is minute, peripheral and/or coincidental.33 This is not to say that modern perspective is suffering a definitive decline. Rather, I mean to suggest that the images produced with MSDs potentially provide evidence of an alternative way of seeing.

Mizuko Ito acknowledges just such a shift. According to Ito, camera phones invite a “persistent alertness.”34 This “new kind of personal awareness,” as Ito qualifies, results

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in images of the serendipitous.35 She cites a December 2002 IPSe Marketing survey, which reported that camera phone users’ images were of “things that they happened upon that were interesting” (emphasis mine).36 What is crucial to notice is the apparent absence of intentionality belonging to imaging with MSDs. ‘Persistent alertness’, then, is not an intentional mode of seeing; it is not goal-oriented; it does not strive to frame a subject according to the protocols of photographic convention: hence, it does not produce images that conform to an appropriate form of amateur imaging. While ‘persistent alertness’ might involve a greater attentiveness, attentiveness is not principally motivated by a particular intent to record images. This is not to preclude any intention underlying the purchase of such imaging devices or certain acts of imaging; it is to suggest that intentionality does not figure centrally, and perhaps not consciously, in moments of imaging. Simply stated, one does not think or plan before one images; imaging is spontaneous—and coincident with one’s encounter with what one images.37

But the images posted to “Identify Game” must also come under question here. For while they seem to exemplify the spontaneity of ‘persistent alertness’, it is difficult to determine the extent to which they are the result of ‘happening upon’, i.e., to what extent they are not, in fact, planned and framed.

After all, the moblog’s description line, insofar as it solicits abstract images, always makes apparent the fact that the images may not be remnants of a process of seeing-imaging. Yet I am inclined to think that whether or not they, themselves, are remnants, the “Identify Game” images, in their illegibility, call attention to the prospect of another way of seeing. And since similar images appear elsewhere on the web in dispersed fashion, the case can be made that “Identify Game” becomes a site of possibility for considering (and perhaps practicing) this new mode of perception. This claim acquires validity in light of the fact that the site administrator admits to having been “inspired by a couple of images that I could not identify in other people’s moblogs.”38 Perhaps then, the “fun” of the game is to activate vision through illegibility.

Recently, Reiter’s Camera Phone Report cited several predictions made by InfoTrends Research Group in its 2004 Worldwide Camera Phone and Photo Messaging Forecast. Among the predictions listed was this one: “Camera phones this year will generate 29 billion digital images.”39 To be sure, much of the discussion that will surround these proliferating images will address issues of public and private, particularly with regard to violations of privacy (e.g., ‘up-skirting’, MSDs in gyms, etc.), as well as questions around the possibilities for social activism


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(e.g., moblogging from the site of a protest, picture-messaging to news stations images of inappropriate uses of power by authorities). Such discussions will be continuations of current discussions. However, other topics may gain visibility, even predominance. For example,

Howard Rheingold has spoken of a need for a new “species of literacy” so that people will know “how to use these tools” so as not to become passive consumers of ‘disinfotainment’ but active producers of social intelligence.40 But this new literacy must also heed the visual specificities of the images produced by MSDs with imaging capabilities. To overlook the distinctions between MSD images, e.g., by categorizing images writ large as information, is to misinterpret what literacy might entail, for it assumes that all images are equally legible—or that they all operate according to codes of legibility.

The fact is that illegibility is a hallmark of a number of MSD images proliferating on the internet and in e-inboxes, etc., and therefore, we must take account of those instances in which illegibilities surface and circulate. In doing so, we might begin to notice instances in which seeing-imaging

coincides with moments of awareness out which illegible images materialize and, by extension, we might begin to recognize the sorts of statements such images might make. In other words, we cannot simply and nonchalantly accept the images produced in processes of seeing-imaging with MSDs as more of the same. Rather, we must consider their potential as evidence of a new mode of seeing, because in the end, to see differently is to challenge older modes of perception—those perpetuating the legitimacy of legibility, with which traditions of amateur photography and filmmaking (willingly or not) have been complicit for so long. Certainly not all seeing that transpires with MSD in hand can be said to participate in a new way of seeing. But the possibility exists. What remains to be seen is how and to what extent this new mode of seeing will be mobilized.

I would like to thank Rachel Thompson and Nicole Woods for responding to the early drafts of this article and Daniel Herbert for his comments regarding issues of indexicality. Also, I would like to extend my appreciation to Broderick Fox for his constructive criticism throughout the writing of this article and Anne Friedberg for her continued encouragement of my scholarship.

Heidi Rae Cooley is a Ph.D. candidate in the Critical Studies Division of the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. She recently received her M.A. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine.

NOTES1 Joi Ito, Joi Ito’s Radio Outline, 2003, http://radio.weblogs.com/0114939/outlines/moblog.html# (2 March 2004). Moblogging is distinct from photoblogging, in which images taken with a camera and downloaded to a computer are uploaded to an electronic noteboard. In both cases, i.e., moblog and photoblog, visitors are able to comment on and/or respond to the images posted. Additionally, moblogging differs from text- and picture-messaging, both of which involve sending messages directly from one mobile phone to another.2 Adam Greenfield, “Moblogging,” V-2 Organization, 5 November 2002, www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=59 (2 March 2004). In this article, Greenfield initially describes moblogging as “what happens when you fuse digital cameras and text-entry functionality with a way to publish it to the Web.” He qualified his definition in a speech given at The First International Moblogging Conference held in Tokyo in July 2003. In his speech, “Whatever Happened to Serendipity? Or, Life in a Thoroughly Moblogged Land,” he explains, “I think moblogs are what happen at the intersection of people, place and information.” See “Whatever Happened to Serendipity?” 3 July 2003, V-2 Organization, www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=501 (2 March 2004). The website for the conference also defines moblogging: “Moblogging is a blanket term that covers a variety of related practices. At its simplest, moblogging (from ‘mobile web logging’) is merely the use of a phone or other mobile device to publish content to the World Wide Web, whether that content be text, images, media files, or some combination of the above.” In some cases,

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moblogged entries can be “tagged” with the coordinates for the location from which the message is posted. See Studies and Observations Group, IMC: First International Moblogging Conference, 2003, http://www.marginwalker.org/1imc/index.html (5 March 2004). On a related note, Howard Rheingold is quick to point out that other moblog practitioner-enthusiasts prefer a pronunciation of ‘moblogging’ that alludes to Smart Mobs, which emphasizes the potential for collective action that Rheingold discusses in his book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. I find this an important connection, albeit one that will remain only tangential to the discussion here. See Howard Rheingold, “Moblogs Seen as Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism,” Online Journalism Review, 9 July 2003, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/technology/1057780670.php (4 March 2004).3 Greenfield, “Moblogging as, um, CRM Enhancement,” V-2 Organization, 27 November 2002, www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=185 (2 March 2004).4 For example, in “Phoning in Photos for Posterity” by Elisa Batista and Kari L. Dean, interviewee Diego Salinas explains, regarding images of the August 2003 New York City blackout that he posted to a moblog, “It was the wonderment of it all. They [friends] could live through my eyes” (my emphasis). As suggested by “through my eyes,” the significance of the images seems as much a matter of his particular experience of seeing as it is the fact that they document an historic event. In other words, the five or six images that Salinas posted to his moblog do not merely present pictures of what he saw; they are understood as providing access to his very process of seeing. See Wired News, 19 August 2003, http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,60082,00.html (2 March 2004). 5 This is not to say that such images of the everyday do not appear on more typical moblogs. In fact, many such images do appear but more sporadically, as will be discussed later in this article.6 The decreasing cost to purchase and operate MSDs, camera phones in particular, make it possible for many people to participate in mobile imaging. Currently in the US it is possible to obtain a free camera phone (when one signs up for cellular service) and monthly fees start at approximately $30.00. This is not to say that all people have access, it is to say that many do. As such, almost anyone can be a reporter, an activist, and/or a photographer.7 See Xeni Jardin, “Everyone’s Posting Instant Photos on the Web. Get Ready for Your Close-up,” Wired Magazine 11, no.7 (July 2003), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/start.html?pg=2 (4 March 2004). Also see Justin Hall, “From Weblog to Moblog,” The Feature, 21 November 2002, http://www.thefeature.com/print?articleid=24815 (2 March 2004). 8 Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 6. Ultimately, Zimmermann argues that amateur film, not merely an inferior film practice, is “a historical process of social control over representation” (xv). She explains within this history, the concept of the amateur has undergone significant transformation: “from a participation in entrepreneurial myths to a popularization of professional equipment as consumer items and, finally to a professionalization of leisure time” (xii). While her principle object is film, her discussion is appropriate to other representational media.9 Zimmermann, Reel Families, 145.10 Michel Citron, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 7.11 See Alan A. Reiter, “Why Will Camera Phones Be Revolutionary?” Reiter’s Camera Phone Report, 31 October 2003, http://www.wirelessmoment.com/value_proposition_camera_phones/index.htm (18 March 2004).12 Zimmermann explains that historically the amateur-professional binary often worked as a mechanism of privilege because only certain people had access to equipment, etc. See Reel Families, 3.13 See Jardin, “Everyone’s Posting Instant Photos.” She asserts that the proliferation of MSDs will increase the number of news events that will be covered by “accidental phone-media diarists.” Ultimately, she concludes, “The world will be one big reality show.”14 As recently as 12 March, 2004, a news station in Pennsylvania listed specifications for camera phone images of breaking news events. These specifications strive to ensure that images submitted conform to particular standards of legibility. They request that camera phone users use the highest resolution, avoid using their digital zoom, hold their phone steady, take outdoor images (for better light), as well as provide details regarding when and where the image is taken. See Reiter, Reiter’s Camera Phone Report, 12 March 2004, http://www.wirelessmoment.com/2004/week11/index.html (12 March 2004).15 Certainly, video artists and abstract art photographers upset standardized modes of representation; however, they have done so in ways that reinforce the amateur-professional binary.16 Roy Ascott, “Photography at the Interface,” in Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, edited by Timothy Druckery (New York: Aperture, 1996), 168. Philip Rosen identifies a similar etymology; however, he adds that the account of the real, which the document makes possible (as well as authentic), proceeds according to “coherent sequenciation,” that is narrative. See Philip Rosen Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 238.17 Ascott, “Photography at the Interface,” 168.18 See the Sprint website (www.sprintpcs.com).19 Similarly, Mizuko Ito has discussed camera phones in terms of “folk journalism among peers,” in which “Things that are personally newsworthy are shared” (26). See Xeni Jardin, “Mining the Mobile Mindset,” On Magazine, December 2003, http://www.ericsson.com/about/publications/onmagazine (12 March 2004).20 Sprint website.21 In addition to the Sprint example that emphasizes the importance of sharing, the Verizon Wireless website states,


HEIDI RAE COOLEY

“Always have your camera phone with you to snap and share the fun” (www.verizonwireless.com). Likewise, the Cingular website reads, “Capture and share moments as they happen” (www.cingular.com). And T-Mobile declares, “T-Mobile camera and video phones help you to capture the fun moments in your life and share them as they happen” (www.t-mobile.com).22 Although it might seem that imaging with MSDs is not so different from the photographs gathered in family photo albums, there is a principle distinction to be made. While conventional family(-related) photographs function to (re)constitute the family through its presenting itself as the proper family, image sharing implicates MSD users in the continuous process of imaging which is then interpreted as serving the interests of relationships. In other words, image sharing is not about containment (e.g., of the nuclear family unit) but a more complete participation in the circulation of images. So, even as a number of MSD images may look like amateur photographs in their choreographing a scene, it seems to me that there is a different disciplinary mechanism at work.23 The world becomes picture through representing, a process that produces legibility. Representing, a verb that means “to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself” (132), objectifies the world, ultimately making it visible to/for oneself; it serves as a means of mastering the world. See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” in The Question of Technology and Other Essays, translated and with introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 129 and 132.24 Two related points are worth mentioning here. First, it is possible to interpret these images as interrupting a sort of photo album-esque narrative/schema that might otherwise be exerted through the sequences of more legible images. Second, it might also be that these images refract a certain illegibility back onto the more legible images, thereby destabilizing the individual narratives they might represent.25 I have presented these ideas in different but related papers (to be) given at Visible Evidence XI in December 2003 and The Life of Mobile Data in April 2004.26 Patricia R. Zimmermann, “The Amateur, the Avant-garde, and Ideologies of Art,” The Journal of Film and Video 38, no. 3-4 (Summer-Fall 1986): 66. In her article, Zimmermann discusses avant-garde qua amateur filmmaking practices in terms that might be interpreted as comprising a different way of seeing, i.e., through “visual experimentation” (76). In the 1920s, such experimentation included “unusual camera angels, moving lights, extreme close-ups for distortion, multiple images, distorting lenses, and use of flashbacks not ordinarily connected logically to the previous scene” (75), while in the post-1950s years it has materialized as a spontaneous and untampered practice (81). But even as these practices might demonstrate a different manner of seeing, they only do so in a marginalized and limited way—at the fringes of more conventional system of amateur practice.27 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador USA), 10 and 11.28 See the entry posted on 20 February, 2004, http://identify.textamerica.com/?r=417192.29 Needless to say, their rate of proliferation and their potential ephemerality may be obstacles to accomplishing any sort of reliable history.30 For example, Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 87-131; Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 3-23; W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn,” in Picture Theory (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1994), 11-34; and Michael Baxandall, “The Period Eye,” in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 29-108.31 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, translated by Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991).32 Ibid., 34.33 While it may be possible to posit a similarity between these images and certain examples of modernist art photographs, I contend that a crucial distinction lay in the fact that everyday people are imaging their experiences of the world without pretensions to art photography. In other words, there is not the conscious effort to produce the image as such. Even the intentionality that might be attributed to the “Identify Game” images is substantially different than the pretenses belonging to modernist photographs.34 Ito uses the term to distinguish camera phones from traditional cameras. Mizuko Ito, “Camera Phones Changing the Definition of Picture-worthy,” Japan Media Review, August 29, 2003, http://www.ojr.org/japan/wireless/1062208524p.php (14 September 2003).35 Ibid.36 Quoted in Ito, “Camera Phones Changing the Definition of Picture-worthy.”37 Of course, it matters who has access to this alternative mode of seeing and under what circumstances, as well as how this mode of seeing is deployed by those who have access—and to what extent access is synonymous with power. Unfortunately, it is not within the scope of this article to attend to these issues more directly.38 Trent, “Identify Game,” 20 January 2004, http://identify.textamerica.com/?r=313380 (13 March 2004).39 Reiter, “Why Camera Phones Will Be Revolutionary,” 31 October 2003, http://www.wirelessmoment.com/value_proposition_camera_phones/index.html (14 March 2004). Note that this number does not include images produced by PDAs.40 Rheingold, “Moblogs Seen as Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism.” He also discusses a related concept, “a new literacy of cooperation,” in Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002).

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