Image Sharing in The Hybrid Age

Join the Discussion on Sharing Photographs in the Modern Era

If you're reading this article on image sharing in the modern era, it's likely that you've landed here after reading Issue No.15 of DigitalBasics.

If not, you might be looking for a place to share your photography online, which you can learn more about by clicking here.

Feel free to skip straight to the Submission Form if you already know what you want to say or the Facebook Comments feature at the bottom of the page.

Image Sharing in The Hybrid Age

In my short life, I've already had a foot in three Ages.

Firstly, I experienced the tail end of the Industrial Age — an era that, to my mind, has almost completely died out.

Put simply, it carried this mentality:

"Go to school, get good grades, go to university, get good grades again and then get a job-for-life."

This mentality still prevailed somewhat even when I was looking for my first job as a photographer's assistant during the mid Nineties.

How many of you would truly believe this to be a viable path through life nowadays, I wonder? It's certainly not a reality that I teach my children.

Then, we moved really very swiftly into The Information Age — the dawn of the internet, where knowledge and quick-witted thinking became king.

Even more rapidly, we have morphed into an age of sharing where we seem increasingly comfortable with image sharing and divulging more and more information about ourselves to whoever wants to know.

I could go the whole hog and call it The Sharing Age but I'd like to bill at as The Hybrid Age, the amalgamation of the Information and Sharing Ages; a time in our social structure that combines a thirst for information and knowledge, as well as a simultaneous willingness to share so much about our personal lives.

Photographs as Social Bookmarks

Now, this could be a potentially wide open topic. So let's keep it simple(r) and stick to image sharing.

Think about it — photographs are now much more than visual representations of a scene; they have become a kind of social bookmark.

Cameras not only record where they are pointing but they also carry all sorts of other information relating to the captured moment. Not least, photographs these days are often geotagged, meaning that the location at which they were taken is actually embedded alongside the photograph!

Facebook and Instagram, sitting in a tree...

If you are a Facebook user, you will also be familiar with the generally hideous facility of tagging, whereby people's names can be attached to the photographs in which they are depicted.

I guess Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, could be pinpointed as having given birth to this modern lifestyle — a lifestyle in which such a huge proportion of the global population find themselves immersed up to their necks in sharing their lives with the rest of the world (myself included).

The popularity of image sharing in my notion of a Hybrid Age has recently been proven in a big way. No doubt, you will have caught up with one of the hot topics of the day — the purchase of Instagram by Facebook for a cool $1bn...

Like millions of others, I've recently become smitten by Instagram and absolutely love it (you can follow me @mrjacklowe, by the way!).

I'm comfortable with sharing the images I make and, I must confess, one of the things I love most of all about Instagram is the instant gratification of receiving praise from my followers.

So, my question to you is this:

I really would love to hear your thoughts on this and, in the context of our photography, I think it would be a useful discussion for us to have.

After all, most of you will have shared imagery all over the internet, not least on my Photo Sharing and Contest pages.

So, where can you express your views?

Right here!

Below, you will see that you can share your thoughts and views by submitting them using the Submission Form or the Facebook Comments feature at the bottom of the page.

So, let's hear your voice and I promise to get stuck in too...!

Return from Image Sharing in The Hybrid Age to the Home Page