Ephemeral Photowork: Understanding the Mobile Social Photography Ecosystem

For many years, researchers have explored digital support for photographs and various methods of interaction around those photos. Services like Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr have demonstrated the value of online photographs in social media. Yet we know relatively little about these new practices of mobile social photography and in-situ sharing. Drawing on screen and audio recordings of mobile photo app use, this paper documents the ephemeral practices of social photography with mobile devices. We uncover how photo use on mobile devices is centered around social interactions through online services, but also face-to-face around the devices themselves. We argue for a new role for the mobile photograph, supporting networks of communication through instantaneous interactions, complemented with rich, in person discussions of captured images with family and friends; photography not for careful selection and archive, but as quick social play and talk. The paper concludes by discussing the design possibilities of ephemeral communication. Researchers have had a longstanding interest in photography, and as digital technology has transformed photography practice, changing user practices (Kirk et al. 2006) and even as a research method in its own right (Carter and Mankoff 2005). The photo and its practice is under constant change and new applications in the past decade, from Flickr to Snapchat, have changed photo sharing practices. But herein lies a problem. It is all too easy to ignore the value and impact of offline sharing in the wake of an abundance of data in a single ecosystem/application. Research has shown us that photographs’ physicality provides a “resource for individual identity construction. . . viscerally remind[ing] people of who they once were in a way” (Odom et al. 2014) especially in close social—particularly family—relationships. In other words, there’s more to photo sharing than online comment threads, and much of this interaction still occurs offline. An alternate, and more neglected, form of photowork is ephemeral (Bayer et al. 2015; Counts and Fellheimer 2004) where photographs are used in the moment, shared, talking about and then discarded. These are not photos that are archived and reflected upon years later, nor are they just photos that are cross posted to various social sites but rather they are also photos instantly shared with friends, with reCopyright c © 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. actions received in real time in-app with social copresence. Social photo-sharing services let users view an abundance of photos in a continual flow, and rather than there being the selection of a set of valuable objects there is instead an abundance of media. These online interactions are not trivial: they prompt discussions, reflections, seed conversations, or illustrate arguments. We characterise this as ephemeral photowork: the use of photographs with lightweight rapid practices, photographs quickly produced, shared and consumed. The data from this paper is based around screen and audio recordings of in-situ mobile device use, supporting a close look at mobile photo work and talk around photos as they are captured and shared.