Flickr and the culture of connectivity: Sharing views, experiences, memories - José van Dijck (2011)

• Flickr - currently the world’s largest photo sharing website.
• Flickr was initially regarded mostly as a photo repository, it has quickly grown into a social network site the value of which hinges on interaction, dynamic exchange and a constant stream of added pictures.
• Through the accumulation of individually uploaded images a joint perspective on the world emerges.
• In a sociological sense of the term, collective memory means people experience a connection between what happens in general and how they are involved as individuals; in a historical or historiographical sense, it means that people somehow feel part of a communal past or ordering of that past.
• The ‘continuous present’ of the World-Wide Web manifests itself in the constant connectivity of people and digital networks.
• According to Flickr’s motto, its function as a social media platform is to collect individual ‘views’ – quite literally, shots taken from one person’s camera – and to bring about shared perspectives or common viewpoints.
• Flickr was also one of the first sites to implement tag clouds – a visual depiction of user-generated tags, which can be categorized alphabetically or by importance.
• Some researchers have lauded Flickr’s potential as a platform for individuals to develop and shape their aesthetic norms and discuss their personal inclinations to discover common taste.
• ‘The digital imaging revolution has not only changed our personal experience in photography but also offered a new perspective on our social life.’ - by tracking shared information between people, events, activity, expressed interests and locations in time, patterns of social interaction are not merely reconstructions but active constructions of social behavior shaped by the ‘technological unconscious’. 
• ‘While doing experience sharing, photos are indeed the most popular and convenient media we use today to translate daily happenings and tell life stories’.
• The idea of sharing photographs as a community-based social activity is firmly rooted in analogue practices of photography. Until the 1990s, sharing laminated pictures (and stories) was indeed a shared social experience conducted commonly within the social circles of family and friends. Very few pictures were actively exchanged beyond those private circles, but this changed as soon as digital cameras penetrated the markets of amateur photography.
• ‘First draft of history’.