Instagram- a social photo sharing application for mobile devices. Has revolutionized the speed of sharing photos and has amplified the outreach. As seen with the research, it has changed the landscape of photojournalism by spreading photos through multiple social circles in real time.
Tackable is a new social journalism platform that combines user-generated content, location-based social tools, and citizen photojournalism into one uniformed app. Users are enabled to share visually interesting things they encounter in the form of photography, with tagged location and a brief description. The taken photos will then be submitted to the public map in real-time and be categorized into different news beats. It, for the first time, puts news reporting at the center of a social network with a focus on photography. In a nutshell, Tackable made (or attempts to make) photojournalism socializable.
Twitter’s concise-emphasizing style and third party photo-hosts once demoted photographs, but as the years progress, their links have transformed to a drop-down within the window that allows users to see photos easily. Here, a photo is only accompanied by 140 characters at best, with the users left with simply the image at hand.
Twitter allows photo hosts to refer to interested parties by saying @username, but it will waste their 140 characters of context that they are allowed. By choosing usernames over context, photojournalism is more an unspoken event between two people rather than a universal one that anyone will understand. However, by choosing context, users lose the ability to give credit or let others know their image is online. Aggregation of images without citing the source or participants creates a vile environment for photojournalism. Until Twitter can accommodate both credit and context, the only thing that Twitter, whose photo uploading has increased by 421%, has is its speed and succinct nature.
Facebook is moving towards a photo-centric platform. The Timeline layout promotes pictures in large frames, while moving textual-based activity to a single box. Their photo-viewer, a “theater” in its own way, encourages lengthy captions, tags, and locations. Photos are no longer just photos, they provide context, places, and people to associate with the image. While Twitter photos are growing in popularity, Facebook is still leading in photo-sharing.
By captioning, tagging, and sharing photos, we become a demanding audience, one that does not simply want an image to ponder on, but one with thoughts and people already attached to them. We seek information, we don’t want to be left with an image that requires further research and work, but one that explains and provides background to the photo’s situation.
[Tackable Uploads] Apr.24.2012 NYU@INC presents: Inside the Internet Garage @ NYU Courant Institute. Guest Speakers: Kara Swisher & Walt Mossberg
[Tackable Uploads] Mar.30.2012 Dress Rehearsal @ Hiltons for The Inner Circle’s NY political lampoon - “Preoccupied”
[Tackable Uploads] Apr.9 2012 Spiritual physician/blogger Deepak Chopra sits and answers questions @ Union Square
