Over-exposure

Friend’s of mine always travel with their camera. Extended lenses, polishing cloths and all. That’s a bit too 'camera geek' for me, but I’m aware that I do have an array of image capture devices on me at all times: From my 5mega-pix camera on my N95 to my newly acquired Panosonic camcorda (which for the geeky amongst you DOES ‘talk’ to my imac and mac book successfully, but only as I’ve the latest version of Leopard running).

You could say that such technology has become so well integrated it has morphed as an (expected) extension of various limbs. Attending events (I was at a wedding over the w/e), out and about, and even on nights out, there is always the means and expectation to ‘capture the moment’. The range of techniques employed is intesteing to watch and to take a part in.

Over the w/e wedding guests happily snapped away alongside the professional photographer and all with promises to upload to Flickr, some even had 'specially made' Flickr cards courtesy of Moo (and yes i was one of them!). The other hot topic for conversation was who was going to be tagged on Facebook. So visible were the range of camera’s and phones pointing, focussing and taking shots that by the end of the day potential subjects barely noticed the click and the flash.

The incorporation of the perfect shot and publication on Web 2.0 and SNSs means that images are re-contextualised; tagged, possibly photo-shopped and set out to networked others. In other words individuals are starting to show to others what they have been up to through the various lenses that they carry.

Commentators have called this the ‘information age’, the scale of which represents a new level of social inclusion as snapshots are commonly treated as effective capture of ‘goings on’. It is worth bearing in mind that these also involve the creation of new forms of content, action and opportunity for interaction in a new social world. We all comment on our friends images, and they in turn comment back.

Gone is the anonymity of ‘what I did at the w/e’, in favour of the ‘look at me, look at me!’ social tagging and content sharing of an over-exposure. Or is it?...