Blog reflections

Review

(Word count: 1086)

a. Provide a definition for ‘analogue photography’.

Analogue photography can stand for the work that processed with film and analogue camera. Once after the photo was taken, it cannot be previewed from the device, the finished photo needs ‘creative decision’ during ‘shooting and in the darkroom’ (Price & Wells 2015, p. 19).

Analogue photography still exists in recent days, the progress of new technology doesn’t leave this old way of object portraying behind, like the development of analogue photography does not lead the death of painting: each different style of image recording has its unique feature, meaning and user communities.

b. Provide a definition for ‘analogue video’.

Analogue video is the type of video that record and stored on film. The original, un-edited analog film is black-and-white. The formation of analogue video is based on electronic signals, these signals are transformed, synthesized and composed with processors and analogue computers, the variation of electronic voltage would resulting output the audio and video (Spielmann 2007, p. 2).

c. Provide a definition for ‘networked photography’.

Before defining networked photography and video, the term “networked” is used specifically since defining media contents in our era as ‘online’ or ‘digital’ is not enough. Networked photography has more abundant meaning: the media in arising information era has connected people to people through various platforms as online communities, and this networking of users have that capability to influence the platform due to the emerging feature of Web 2.0. The interaction and interchanging impact among users, platforms and the service providers have made the photography become networked, as the ‘new media ecology’, as Martin Lister (cited in Sandbye 2016, p. 96)claim that ‘a new media ecology’ is appealed by both people and the trend of the times.

Networked photography is strongly personal-related, emphasizing the sense of experience and community, and more inclusive for its audience due to the online and immediacy feature of Web 2.0 based platform–in our case, is photography that posted on Instagram.

d. Provide a definition for ‘networked video’.

Networked video stands for the online published video. With the current situation, it could refer to the video that is accessible for not only traditional devices with internet access (for example, desktop computer), but also the new and developing mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. The nature of the networked video is alike networked photography, it is developed to cope with the arising networked media circumstances: adapting smaller size devices, using digital and online storage, spreading the created content base on online platforms and services. From preproduction to postproduction, the networked video is aiming to shift the online spaces from private ‘personal storage’ of contents to ‘platform for public self-expression’ (Berry, T. B 2018, p. 33), connecting people through platforms.

e. Provide definitions for the terms ‘authoring’, ‘publishing’ and ‘distributing’.

Authoring means the act of a person someone originally designs and produces something, then declare the attribution of the work under this person’s name. This act also naturally entitles this person with the copyright of his/her authored work. Publishing is the description of letting the authored work become accessible to the public. Distributing is to deliver the created content. This act is mostly taken by third-party after having permission from the author. The distributing can have commercial, educational or philanthropic purposes, make the work purchasable in digital or material form, or be involved in public-oriented exhibitions.

f. What differences and similarities did you discover between the way analogue and networked photos are authored, published and distributed?

The similarities between these two types of photography could be considered as their shared limitation: the photography does not ‘directly replicate circumstances’ (Price & Wells 2015, p. 19), neither of these two generations of photography can represent the objective reality of their subject of photographs. This limitation comes both in the nature of photography and the technical barriers of devices. Photos are taken by people, no matter how the technology has evolved, the photography is authored, published and distributed with perspective. Besides, technical-wise, analogue photography comes in black-and-white, networked photography are published with post-processing, re-creating aura within the photography (Halpern, M & Humphreys, L 2014, p. 8).

However, the authoring has still significantly changed from analogue to networked photography. For example, selfie, as an emerging genre of Instagram photography, which is strongly personal-related, the authoring of networked photography can be considered as requiring less discipline of techniques, while emphasizing community and everyday activity(Sandbye 2016, p.97). This phenomenon of self-authoring in Instagram highlights the social media is in an era characterised by hyper-individualism (Sluis 2016, p. 285). However, in the age when analogue photography is the majority of photography, taking a photo of the author’s own is neither popular nor convenient. Nevertheless, the authoring of analogue photography is more memory-embalming(Sandbye 2016, p.97).

Meanwhile, the publishing and distributing of photography process were influenced by the fast developing technology of online platform. Smartphones, as the main equipment participated in networked photography’s production, made the process ‘significantly faster, more convenient’ than the process of sharing analogue photography, because it lowers the barriers of spreading photography to the public. (Halpern, M & Humphreys, L 2014, p. 2)

g. What differences and similarities did you discover between the way analogue and networked videos are authored, published and distributed?

If analogue photography is considered as high-cost and difficult for introductory producers due to the various equipment it relies on, then analog videos’ production is more for that inconvenience. Analogue videos required more professional devices and concrete-based knowledge to produce. Nam June Paik, with the knowledge about the principle of analogue video that people rarely have at his time, was qualified to create his video art. What Instagram has changed with its amateur-user-friendly feature is that video clips are easy to produce and publish, with automatically copyrighted under the publisher (also the author in most cases)’s profile page, the authoring-publishing process is unnoticeably done during several easy operations, and the distribution could be done by other users in the platform or external third party with permissions.

One of the significant advantages of networked videos during distributing is they are cheaper while more convenient to transfer and duplicate. Digital storage has the ability to be duplicated without lose any data contains due to the feature of digital signals; however, for analogue videos, copying contents from another film could cause unpredictable loss of contents. These losses due to technical barriers have caused analogue video ‘expensive to distribute’ (Berry, T. B 2018, p. 8)

For a prompt-relating example about affordance of Instagram, it is that any videos that have been uploaded to this platform are accessible for every user of it, the distributing to each receiving terminal is synchronal and lossless, and if the content was not for commercial use but under the rule of fair dealing, to keep the content is mostly legal and free.

So far, I would consider that analogue and networked videos have few while inapparent similarities during authoring, publishing and distributing, hence would not be addressed in this review.

References

Berry, T. B 2018, Videoblogging Before YouTube, Institute of Network Cultures, viewed 14 March 2018, pp. 8-33.

Halpern M and Humphreys, L 2014, Iphoneography as an emergent art world. New Media & Society.

Lister, M 2009, at the conference ‘Private Eyes’, Copenhagen University, November 2009.

Pirce, D and Wells, L 2015, ‘Thinking about photography: debates,
historically and now’, in Wells, L (ed), Photography: a critical introduction. Routledge. pp. 9-27.

Sandbye, M 2016, ‘It Has Not Been – It Is. The Signaletic Transformation of Photography’, in Kuc, K. and Zylinska (eds),  Photomediations: A Reader, Open Humanities Press, London. pp. 95-108.

Sluis, K 2016, ‘Authorship, Collaboration, Computation?
Into the Realm of Similar Images’, in Kuc, K. and Zylinska (eds),  Photomediations: A Reader, Open Humanities Press, London. pp. 283-289.

Spielmann, Y 2007, Video: The Reflexive Medium. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts