CMNS 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Consumerism, Digital Photography, Social Currency

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Communication
• Course: CMNS 210
• Professor: Stuart Poyntz

Document Summary

Ewen: image/style becomes a form of social currency in our market society; photos are a medium of pretension. Sontag: image world domination; representation/appearance is preferred over the reality/being. Photograph becomes a form of popular communication; a new culture of space and time; introduces a new foreground about surfaces as it skins reality by making an impression of a moment. Sontag: a modern person thinks and understands of the world around them through living in and with images; a chief activity of a modern society is producing and consuming images. Digital photograph: immediately translated to digital codes/data and then is converted into images; the immediate connection (the light) between the real world image and the photo is lost in digital photography. Reality is redefined; people increasingly turn to the photo to understand the world; it is accessible, easy for us to hold onto the past, mass reach; it reorganizes behaviour of people; photos become surveillance.