Covid-19: the cultural constructions of a global crisis

This is the Introduction to the special issue on Covid-19 and the cultural constructions of a global crisis. Contextualizing understandings of the pandemic in relation to the concepts of ‘event’ and ‘crisis’, especially to the idea that modernity is itself a condition of perpetual crisis, it proposes that the pandemic is a crisis-event that catalyses new possibilities for making visible endemic inequalities and injustices across highly variable cultural and social domains, from the personal to the global. Always open to containment and appropriation, this crisis of visibility and invisibility is discussed as it pertains to the body, to space and social proximity, and to media and mediation. The individual contributions to the special issue are introduced in relation to these topics

RELIVING MEMORIES (OVER AND OVER AGAIN): GIFS, MOVING PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE SMARTPHONE ALBUM

This paper examines potential changes in the temporal experience of everyday digital media through the smartphone photo album. Smartphone photo albums not only organize and display domestic photographs but also initiate temporally novel photographic formats: for instance, the images taken by users can be used as raw material in the production of new kinds of ‘moving’ or ‘animated’ photographic products, usually formatted as GIF files and characterized by looped time. While the character of these products and the processes of their creation vary across operating systems, both Google’s and Apple’s systems radically disrupt the conventional assumptions of photography theory regarding photography’s relations with time. Pre-digital photography theory postulated a key distinction between a photograph and a movie or video: the photograph is static; the movie is characterized by temporal progression. In contrast, the GIF presents a shift from linear temporality to looped, cyclical time, promoting a present tense made visible not through instantaneous capture (photography) or sequential unfolding (film and video), but through continual recurrence. It eliminates the linearity of past-present-future because of its perpetual looped temporality, constituting a hybrid between photographic still and film or video. As a result, the repetitive movement of the GIF constructs a generalized impression of an event as an artificial duration without development, rather than the structured narrative of an event as a temporal unfolding. The emergence of the GIF in the smartphone album thus signals the rise of a new structure of memory and temporal experience in everyday mediated life

"TASTE THIS VIDEO!": FACEBOOK VIDEOS AS EMBODIED EXPERIENCES.

Videos are among the most widely used media formats on Facebook. Yet little research has been done on their aesthetic and formal attributes, and especially on how they operate within the frameworks of attention, interruption and embodied interaction specific to social media interfaces. This paper examines recipe videos published on Tasty, one of the most popular Facebook pages in the world. We analyze these videos through a novel three-dimensional model that integrates their semiotic characteristics (visual, auditory and textual), their interactive and haptic qualities, and their invitation to perceptual engagement and sensorimotor response. We conclude that Facebook recipe videos are exemplary of a broader category of social media videos which we call hyper-sensory videos: these create heightened multisensory experiences that take precedent over informational use or narrative involvement, revealing the deeply physical character of our connections to social media and a yearning for embodied presence in what we might call our online-life

FROM USER GENERATED CONTENT TO A USER GENERATED AESTHETIC: INSTAGRAM, BRANDS AND THE APPROPRIATION OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Recent research has emphasized the increasing professionalization of ‘user-generated content’ for digital networks and social media. This paper highlights a contrary but parallel process: the aesthetic ‘vernacularization’ of brand images on social media and the adoption of recognizably ‘amateur’ styles by corporate brands. Analyzing the official Instagram accounts of 24 leading fashion brands between 2014-18, our research project identified eight distinctive patterns in the corporate adoption of vernacular photographic styles. In this paper we discuss the three most common patterns: (1) Regramming: sharing and crediting users’ photographs on the brands’ official feed ;(2) Vernacular celebrity: posting the ‘amateur-looking’ photographs of a celebrity or model associated with the brand; (3) Brandfies: selfie-style images created by brands themselves where the brand appears to be the ‘self’ that performs its own representation. Following this analysis, we argue that user-generated content has become detached from its primary authorial configuration (being generated by non-professional users) and has solidified into a recognizable style, a ‘user-generated aesthetic’, available for brand appropriation. This detachment constitutes a form of ‘context collapse’ that is characteristic of social media in other respects, but here appears in visual form: as the collapse of contextual distinctions that enable viewers to infer authorial status, milieu and purposes from visual indicators. It further conforms to the expansion of branding practices beyond the purview of marketing, advertising and celebrity into all aspects of social life, and in particular to Instagram as a social media platform that enacts marketplace logics