You yourself started the countdown a few weeks before when you posted on Facebook, “I’ve got my tickets to Bali!” When the day came, Facebook geo-localized you at the airport. And where there’s vacation, there’s vacation photos.
In the 1980s, Richard Chalfen, a professor of anthropology at Temple University in Philadelphia, coined the term “Kodak culture” to describe how photography (these were the days of film cameras) is a means to capture important events like marriages, births and travel, a tool that allows one to share moments from our lives not only with other people, but with future generations as well. Today, putting photographs online can be the beginning of a conversation. As soon as the photos are uploaded, we wait to see who will make the first comment. We share these experiences in a playful way.
With the advent of digital cameras and the Internet, what was once confined to yellowing photo albums has achieved a new visibility. Family memory is becoming digital.
Facebook is a platform where we can control what is seen: users have the option to make public very personal events from their lives. In a few years, will our children still have our old family photo albums? Or will they simply call up our retro Facebook or other photosharing sites profiles from the 2010’s ?
Pauline Auzou
All the photos used in this article were taken at random from publicly available Facebook photo albums.
