Digital Presence
Christmas time, amongst other things, is a time for present giving and receiving. And an annual problem is finding gifts for those close to you, and for those you have been buying presents for, for most of your life; parents especially!
This year, I have brought my parents a digital photo frame. Allowing them to watch a sequence of pictures of their family throughout the years – ‘share your memories’ it states on the box – it truly is a present that keeps on giving!
The digital frames on sale – from Boots to Bloomingdales – are, by and large, generic in design: plastic, shiny and oblong. Of interest here are the images used to market the frames. On counter displays and the Internet alike, the images are the usual family/holiday/funny typologies; the same as those used to market the ‘Box Brownie’ over 100 years ago!
Display – as a principal to communication – is core to all design. It is the visual counterpoint to dialogue or face-to-face communication if you like. The photo frame is an example of public display and through it we construct a normative dialogue: a picture of the kids with their grandparents for instance (the same narrative structures are seen in advertisements for family cars, soap powder and fast foods).
An image in a frame is a conscious validation of an image – we like this image so much we want you to see it! The framed image enters the public sphere as apposed to the photo-album, which, essentially, belongs to the realm of the private sphere (we have direct control over who and when it is viewed: the viewing is in effect, an undemocratic practice) Both are potential active components of display and, for the sake of my argument, demarcate the private/public sphere.
For the cultural critic Jurgen Habermas the ‘public sphere’ is integral to his critical thinking on Western culture. It is the implosion of the private/public sphere, he argues, which is decisive in how Society developed from the 18th Century onwards. In short, Habermas believes it was the familial life of the day-to-day: parenting, entertaining, domestic economics, which provided a platform for ideas and concerns of a person’s subjective self; to be negotiated and allowed to enter into a bigger – public – world. Namely, to enter the public consciousness via the developing media’s of the press, the popular novel and other textual material; the political pamphlet for instance, as well as the face-to-face communication taking place in coffee shops and other ‘commercial’ spaces. Through this matrix, an organic democratic process was maintained which supported coherent and stable cultural development (at least if you were a white heterosexual male of ‘bourgeoisie’ society).
For Habermas, it is important that the subjective discussions that have their origins in the familial and social spaces of communication, are critically assessed; to be validated through a process of public interlocution – discourses – that ultimately allow for consensus. A process he names ‘communicative reason’.
This process is temporally bound, relational and, arguably, democratic. All play a key role in the normative function of communication (how we make sense of our world). This pure notion of communication is, for Habermas, ‘distorted’ by the (mis)uses of technology.
I am attracted to how contemporary design– from the WWW to digital imaging – penetrates the public sphere and how digital technology especially, acts as a distorting agent in the visual realm of communication. But for now, I am using the digital photo-frame and the family photograph as my catalyst in the paradigm-shift of public digital image display.
What is interesting about digital culture is how the language of zero and ones has no half-life. In effect, the erasure of digital information leaves no residue – it is absolute. This is most apparent – or brutal – in digital imagery: a camera asks if we would like to save the image? The instant editing process is equally present in the software of web design or word-processing. The digital photographer is as much editor, as image maker.
Back to my parents digital frame and the traditional family photo-album.
The metaphor of the ‘photo-album’ has dominated how we construct the personal photo image (similar to the internet ‘page’ in how we conceptualize the WWW). But, where-as the photo-album is fixed – a material element in cultural memory. The digital image is fixed, instant and transient: depending on the editor’s mood. This process is akin to many of the doubts that inform Habermas’s concerns over a commodified culture. Where-as, it could be argued, the original box brownie camera democratised the photographic image; not only in allowing access to the technology but also in acquiring a (critical) language for the understanding of photography through the discourse of the new user/expert (There was also an important equation between the temporal taking of the photograph and the captured ‘now’ of the photographic trace). The inverse is true of the digital image, which, from camera to PC, reduces the image to a simple standardization of the editing process – ‘enjoyment without being tied to stringent presuppositions [a language of photography]’. Habermas further comments: …Mass culture leaves no lasting trace; it affords a kind of experience which is not cumulative but regressive’.*
…
Already, my parents have edited out images of partners (long since divorced), bad hair days, and when the grandchildren went through a less photogenic stage – of acne and teenage angst. They present a perfect image to the public sphere – no debate needed.
Merry Christmas 2008
Colin Davies
*Habermas, J.(1992) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
. Cambridge: Polity Press.
‘Mass culture leaves no lasting trace; it affords a kind of experience which is not cumulative but regressive’ -
-Is the photo frame as a-memorial?
/Amy Arnhem 05/01/2009