I am attempting to understand what more I can learn about how social media has affected the images I posted on flickr and facebook.

The main thing I’ve noticed is that I can see how many views they’ve had, and how few comments in comparison. I have also noticed that the images viewed are the 10, in two batches of 5, that appear as thumbnails on my blog. No one has gone on to look at images further into my photostream

While I’m pleased to see that people have looked at some of what I’ve posted, I’m not sure how to interpret the lack of comments. On the other hand, I often do the same thing – look at images people have posted without commenting. I guess this is because there is just so much to look at, and you can’t comment on all of it unless you have no other real life. I find that I only comment on things that affect me really strongly. A lot of what gets posted is social, so it doesn’t really affect me enough to comment.

That is why I posted some of my personal work, thinking it would generate more comments that party images. Not necessarily.

The other thing that is changed by social media is the way images and videos circulate. Things get forwarded, favourited, and passed around in a way that would only happen at a party otherwise. In fact, it’s not at all like a party, because that would generally be a finite number of people, over a limited duration, and with some kind of common connection and physical presence.

Flickr and facebook allow everything to be endlessly distributed via links well beyond your own social network. The good thing about this is that it can provide a much bigger audience for your work. The bad thing is that it can eliminate your creative attribution in the process. If authorship isn’t important to the work, that’s fine, but when it comes to art, it’s more difficult for me to accept. It also facilitates people re-using or re-working your images in whatever way they like. From a collaborative viewpoint you could see this as positive, but personally, I don’t like the idea much. Of course this is true of any internet-based image, whether in social media or otherwise.

One other thing I dislike about flickr is that while I can group work into different albums, which I have done, I cannot control the sequence that they appear in, including what appears next to each other. This is very frustrating! Context and relationships between images are important, and flikr destroys that. Perhaps there is a work-around to this, but I haven’t discovered it yet.