Cyberspace Photography Sunday April 30, 2006
A few years ago during and then after my first MA, I became quite interested in the psychology of cyberspace. For a year or two, I even considered doing a PhD on the subject. I’m glad I didn’t because in retrospect it was never sufficiently central to the kind of interests I have, and the outlook I have on life. Rather, it was one of the more interesting topics during a badly managed and somewhat flawed degree. My own experience of ‘cyberspace’ has moved through two phases of text and photo interaction, as follows.
During my degree, I speculated and theorised about the spatial qualities of the internet and how it’s real but not real, theatrical and deceiving. I quoted a well-reported story from the 90s, in which a graphical-forum participant was subjected to ‘rape’ by another member: he hacked the system, and forced her ‘avatar’ to perform lewd acts. At the time, I evaluated this in terms of its ambivalent status and how in one sense it was ludicrous, but in another sense the victim’s feelings could not be dismissed. Since that time I’ve participated in several internet forums where the exchange became ridiculous and abusive, and now understand how you become psychologically involved: you can be hurt, you can feel vulnerable and attacked and misunderstood but more importantly, you can switch the computer off and establish some perspective. I laugh at the rape story now, because ultimately it’s ridiculous. I hope the “victim” eventually realised that.
The more accurate conclusions about the rape story don’t concern the above ‘ambivalence’, but the underlying psychological process whereby you invest emotional meaning in your VDU experience, and how to understand that. I realised that if I participated at forums I would quite likely encounter some unpleasant exchanges, depending on the subject matter and where I went. Internet forums are a frustrating medium because of their inherent limitations. It feels like you have control and an interactive presence in a civil environment with similar-minded people, but that may not be true and you can be emotionally hurt, with a strange feeling that you also shouldn’t be. When your VDU is like an Aladdin’s Cave portal in the corner of your cosy living room, it seems innocuous and fun. And mostly it is, but not always. I approached the forum with a scholarly attitude, hoping/expecting a similar response. The lesson I learned is, you need to feel some control because hostility and abuse is unpleasant on a VDU display where you have contributed, and if you don’t find peace and control in one place – just move on, or even build your own forum. As in life, so on the internet: there are millions of people with millions of different viewpoints, you don’t expect to agree with everyone, like everyone, or want to associate with everyone.
Then I became tired and bored with text interaction, and discovered photoblogs. Suddenly, here was a means of expression that would never provoke misunderstanding or hostility – unless of course the images were politically or ideologically inflammatory. And interestingly, words tend to correspond to the conscious and rational mind, whereas images coincide with the unconscious or dreaming mind. In many respects, digital photography evolves from and continues the cultural and aesthetic trajectory that started with people like Fox-Talbot and the camera obscura. But in other respects, culturally and technologically, it’s another dimension of the digital revolution, and cyberspace in particular, now that millions of people use the internet to present photographs. When I publish a photo from my camera, that picture becomes part of cyberspace. So you could argue the camera itself enters cyberspace, has become an extension of cyberspace, and the result is this abstract space is an expression of millions of camera ‘eyes’, all over the world. Then you have forums like www.PhotoPoint.com and www.dpreview.com , where you find information about hardware and technique, and maybe enhance your understanding of photography philosophy. Most of those participants also share their photos online so the scale of photography on the internet makes it an inherent part of ‘cyberspace’, because there’s so much of it. But more than that, the psychological aspects of photography become intertwined with the psychological aspects of online interaction. A photoblog is both a technical and psychological part of cyberspace; it continues the cultural trajectory of the text blog, using the logic of a diary whereby much of the fun and interest derives from its technical possibility: it’s fun, because you can. Because it expresses a personalised presence that very often, would not be interesting in an offline photographic context. It has qualities, in other words, not inherent to photography per se: diary-like, interactive, personal, world-wide and 24/7. As McLuhan said, the medium is the message.
