Content Development

Hey bloggers <3

Thought I would quickly upload the content development side of our feature, which we covered in our pitch.

Our feature will focus on both the internal sense of self, and the external way we are perceived by others. To address the internal process of self-construction we will interview academics in the sociology and cultural studies departments. We will also explore this issue through personal reflection, where each of us will embark on a “visual media journey” and investigate how the practice of image sharing relates to self identity. We will each journey into a particular visual platform – Nicola will be looking at Instagram, Mel will be looking at Facebook (focusing on the profile and cover pictures, as well as controlling photo tagging), Anna will be looking at Tumblr, Paul will be looking at photo editing in iPhoto before posting online, and I’ll be looking at Pinterest.

To address the way image sharing shapes the way we are perceived by others, we will focus on various implications of image sharing. We haven’t fully decided on everything we’ll focus on in this section yet, but our main ideas at the moment are:

• Firstly, how many kids who grow up today will have their whole lives online, and some with be very widely known courtesy of popular mummy bloggers. How will this affect the way they are perceived by others as they grow up? For this, we’ll try to interview some mummy bloggers and maybe a child psychologist
• And secondly, how photos you put up on facebook can have a negative impact if seen by the wrong person e.g. your boss, or if you are a high profile person, for example, the fallout from the “gun photo” of Australian Olympic swimmers Nick D’Arcy and Kenrick Monk. For this, we aim to interview some careers advisors and people who have been negatively impacted by photos they’ve posted online.
• Thirdly, we’d like to look at how images that go viral impact the people in them, such as people commonly featured in internet memes.

For this feature, we aim to use the online medium in innovative ways by playing with the internal self versus external self juxtaposition. We were thinking of having an opening page with doors or windows, one looking inside and another looking outside. When users click on the inside facing one, they would be led to our personal journeys and stories about self-construction, and when they click on the outside facing one, they will be led to the articles about how image sharing impacts the way others see us.

We want to use as much visual content as possible, seeing as our feature is about the visual web. We’re also looking at making the site interactive, through enabling comments and allowing users to submit photos, maybe in gallery series such as ‘Edited or Not?’, where people have to guess whether the photo is edited, or ‘Before and after’, where people post photos before and after editing or filtering, or where people get to post captions for photos. The feature will also have a page on Facebook that we’ll regularly update, providing another chance for users to interact with our site.

xx Nicola

Handout from the pitch

Exploring the Implications of The Visual Web

On the 30th April, 2012, Richard McManus, founder and editor-in-chief of ReadWriteWeb, said: “A noticeable trend this year is beautiful apps and websites. It's all part of a larger trend that I'm calling The Visual Web, meaning that images and video are becoming an increasingly important part of what we consume online.”

I'm writing this post somewhere on the road between Edmonton and Banff in Canada. In four days I'll be presenting at a conference at the University of Alberta about The Visual Web and the power of the image to give the disadvantaged a voice in the media.

There are several statistics that support the rise of The Visual Web. 70% of all likes, comments and shares on Facebook are now related to images, the image sharing platform, Pinterest, is the fastest growing website in history, and changes to the layout of Facebook are targeted at more visual users.

What are we supposed to do with these statistics? Is it simply an indication of our ever decreasing attention spans? Perhaps it is, but I am suggesting that the trend towards a more visual web has several implications. In my presentation in Canada I will be speaking about the positive aspects of this trend, and the fact that it no longer limits the global, online community to educated, literate citizens. Anyone, of any age, can tell a story through a photograph.

There are several implications of this trend, both positive and negative, that we could focus on in our feature. What are the privacy implications of a more visual web? Are we seeing more than we are entitled to? When mothers post their children's photographs on Facebook as soon as they are born, how will these children respond when they grow up and find that the web is saturated with their baby photos?

The notion of the visual web is a new concept, with a lot of unexplored territory.