" . . . we are “turning photography into a communication medium.”
There is a tendency to treat the time before social media as a pre-tech cavern in which there were few extant tools available for communication. I argue that photography was a communication medium from its inception.
To document the aftermath of the battle of Antietam a set of photographs was made of the battlefield carnage. Matthew Brady displayed these in his New York City studio. The effect on the viewing public was profound and is often cited as having played a major role in changing public sentiment regarding the war.
There are myriad other historical examples of photography's impact as a communication medium--getting across salient ideas without words or text; Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives," images from Alabama and Mississippi during the 1960s Civil Rights campaign and television images of the Vietnam War to name a few. It is not the media, but the platform that allows their use that has and is changing.
I think it would be more accurate to suggest that platforms created by contemporary technology to host social media have offered people more opportunities to utilize non-text media types as means to enhance the way they share their day to day stories.
The Power of Literacy:
Sometimes the new ends up sheltering the old . . .
In the early 20th century, when film came into being and had no extant vocabulary (or metaphor system), it was remediated using the vocabulary of theater--its closest relative. When film became more popular than theater, the film vocabulary retained its links with theater through a shared metaphor system that has enhanced both. Perhaps new media technologies will do the same w/text.
Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
– Alan Kay
