So for our group assignment this week Sean, David, Monica and I had to do a group study of Flickr. I’ve never used Flickr, except to look at other people’s pictures, mostly of TNO, so it was really interesting for me.
We were looking at how Flickr interacts with the “real world”, or the incursion of people’s real lives into what used to be called cyberspace. In a very fundamental way the sharing of pictures of yourself is an activity changes online bulletin board communities. Sometimes people feel compelled to show one another what they look like and it has an impact to find out what your online friends really look like. Flickr is a service based entirely on sharing picture of you and your life often including your friends. Although some people take pictures of beautiful things in nature, most contributors allow other users to learn about them and their lives.
Sean showed us the Memory Maps people have started making using pictures from Google Earth of places they know well. It’s a really beautiful idea – marking a satellite photograph and marking it with your own stories, your own identification with a place. It adds something that is neither real world, nor cyberspace but relies on both to exist. I wonder if people with memory maps of the same area ever find each other and compare notes? That would be sweet.
