Digital Cameras, Personal Photography and the Reconfiguration of Spatial Experiences

Abstract

Digital technology has transformed the nature of photography and its cultural significance. This article addresses how the use of portable digital cameras and the subsequent exploitation of personal photos as major user-generated content on the Internet have transformed the cultural meaning of framing, taking, displaying, compiling, and reviewing photographs. It especially focuses on how digital photographic practices have changed as people are increasingly choosing to carry digital cameras with them at all times and to compile their output on the Web, as well as how these practices have affected people's spatial experiences with and within the physical world. Based on qualitative interview data collected from nineteen Korean digital camera users, this study explores how personal digital photography, as a tool to register personal experiences in physical space as well as a currency for communicating in digital space, has affected people's sense of physical place and thus has contributed to the ongoing hybridization of physical and digital experiences.Keywords digital cameras, digital flâneur, sense of place, social networking sites, spatial imagery One of the main concerns of media studies is the way that changing media environments have redefined the interdependence of the media and its human subjects and consequently how media have shaped the way we perceive and make sense of the world around us. As Marshall McLuhan's (1964) notion of media as "extensions of man" suggests, different forms of media affect the nature of our interactions with the world, and human experiences are conditioned by the specific quality of media technologies. Digital communication technologies, which

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