Share your photos. Watch the world.

Welcome to Flickr: a Yahoo company, "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world." With nearly 5,000 uploads in the last minute and 3.2 million things "geotagged" in the last month, Flickr seems to be the ultimate photo sharing website. Personally, I had never heard of Flickr and wondered how/if it differed from sites like Facebook and Myspace. So I took the Magical Feature Tour (yes, it's actually called that) and found it to be marketed as a bit more family oriented, a place to share your favorite photos with "the people who matter to you". Stay in touch, make albums, organize/edit pictures, make "stuff" including "sexy cards" and photo books.
We decided to use Flickr as our primary medium. We chose to focus on the keyword identity, and picked out some of our favorite pictures that came up when we entered the word in the search bar. We chose those pictures for specific reasons, we knew that we would be able to make some commentary about them in the context of our class, of other key words and concepts that we've been talking about in the past few weeks. We wondered though, how would the general public react to these pictures. Would they evoke the same ideas? Would people be able to recognize these as social commentary rather than simple, contextless photos?
Clearly, we could not get opinions representative of the "general public" (I still can't grasp any concept of statistics, help Crystal!) But we could chose an audience through various other media to get an idea of what at least a few people thought about the pictures.
We narrowed our photos down and decided on Youtube, Facebook, and several other sites (for the purposes of this post I will focus on these two because I am most exposed to them). Our intended audience then is internet users.
Youtube: "Broadcast Yourself." The famous website with millions of videos from the Obama speech at the Democratic National Convention to one of a cat playing with yarn. These videos are posted by anyone who has the free subscription to Youtube, and are accessible to anyone who has the internet. We made a video that included all of our pictures and posted it on Youtube. Though not all internet users utlize Youtube, there are a great number of people who do, the video would allow many people to comment on the photos. A concern here is that people may not bother to do so. There are so many videos out there, what if no one comes across ours? And if they do, again, will they take the time to comment? Because we could not use some statistical surveying method to ensure enough commentary to generalize about Youtube/internet users, we decided that we had to simply put, take the comments that we could get. Another consideration is that those people who did comment are ones who were interested in the photos and did have something to say. Those who did not comment may have not had anything to say.

Next we made our Facebook group where we posted each of the pictures and asked our friends to comment. Facebook: "a social utility that connects you with the people around you." One of the most popular sites on the internet, millions of people join to keep up with friends and family, share photos, even reconnect with old classmates. Our main audience now is our friends on Facebook.We were each in a position to "invite" others to the group, we hoped that most of the people who joined the group would help us by commenting on the photos. In my case, I invited several people, a few of whom I thought would actually participate. We have 68 members so far, five have made comments on the photos. I found it interesting that so many people joined, yet so little took the time to note what they thought of the pictures. I asked my sister if she had gotten my invitation, she said that she hadn't really paid attention because she gets so many "random" group invitations that she is not interested in. A concern again for this medium is that people will write the group off because there are so many other groups out there, this one may simply not catch their attention.
Again, we must take the comments that we do get and discuss those. Our audience for these two mediums are not as specific as for our forums that Crystal is working on (each of which has a majority of participants of the same gender with specific interests and ideas), but the idea is that for each of these we do include the entire internet population. Though people may not go to a website, join a forum, or a group, or take the time to make commentary about a few photos, they do have the option to do so. Our photos are out "there", they are accessible to anyone who can access the internet. Whether they will come across them, let alone participate, however, is a very different question.