NOTE: This is a “reprint” of my blog post to Kodak’s previous “A Thousand Words” blog.
Recently, Gideon D’Arcangelo gave a talk on Active Listening: Social Identity in the New Music Economy at the BayCHI March monthly meeting. If you listen to Public Radio, you may already know of Gideon from his Listening In radio documentary series on American Public Media’s Weekend America, or his Walkman Busting segments that he produced for Public Radio International’s The Next Big Thing. Part of Gideon’s BayCHI talk focused on “Music and Identity.” MP3 players now let us carry so many songs with us, that we can literally carry our whole music collection with us wherever we go. If we can carry all of our songs with us, we can listen to any song we want to at any given time, from any given place. The music we are playing at any given moment from our MP3 player can now reflect more of our identity, rather than a reflection of the limited amount of music we can carry at any given time. In his Walkman Busting series, Gideon stopped people on the street and conducted short interviews on what they were listening to, as well as other music in which they were interested. This whole notion of how the music we listen to can be a reflection of our identity got me thinking… is there a parallel to this related to pictures? That is, how are the pictures we carry with us a reflection of our identity?
Over the past few days, I started my own sort of “Photo Busting” or “Looking In” activity. I basically asked people if they wouldn’t mind showing me the wallpaper on their cellphone and explaining what the photo meant to them. Here are some samples of what I found:
- Joe, a twenty-something student from the Art Institute of California in San Francisco captures street art that he likes and uses that as his wallpaper on his cell phone;
- Lindsay, a twenty-something single professional from San Francisco has a picture of her cat;
- Dave, a thirty-something software engineer from Rochester has a picture from a recent trip to Colorado.
What about you? What photo(s) do you carry with you all of the time (e.g., such as on your camera phone) and what do they say about your identity? Here are three ways you can share your answer to this question:
- Leave a note in the comments section
- Fill out the short online survey
- Upload a picture to flickr and tag it with photo_identity
If we get enough responses, I will provide a summary of the results in a follow-up posting!