In visual sociology class we were asked to read Chapter 7 of Douglas Harper’s 2012 book “Visual Sociology” and write our thoughts on digital images being impermanent. Our professor used the phrase “fleeting images”. But contrary to what Harper suggested in his text, digital images are not nearly as impermanent as people like to think they are. Here is my submission.
The phrase fleeting images refer to images which do not stick in social consciousness the way images would when images were rarer. Harper (2012:141) states, “Images made by digital technologies are less rooted in realist assumptions because they are very easy to change, and they also flow up continually in a vast cloud, around and through the global community via the Internet.” One example would be a photo posted to Instagram from a mobile phone. A group of 12 people can all photograph the same scene in a park–let us assume a tour group stumbled upon a public marriage proposal–upload it to their 12 separate Instagram accounts, and via 12 different choices of Instagram filters and added graphics or text end up with 12 very different photos of the same event. Within a few hours those 12 different photos are lost in the flood of images uploaded to Instagram every day. This seems to suggest the images are not likely to have any sociological impact and will quickly be forgotten.
People often make the mistake of thinking of digital images as impermanent things quickly forgotten. The fact is we never know which images will remain a part of social consciousness long after the moment has passed. Harper (2012:142) relegated Congressman Anthony Weiner’s sexually explicit self-portraits to “a micro visual footnote of 2011”. But here we are in 2017, and every time Anthony Weiner’s name comes up in the media, those photos are mentioned. Rather than being a footnote, as Harper assumed they would be, those photos have irrevocably changed the way society thinks of Congressman Weiner.
Furthermore, no digital image is truly “fleeting” unless it was created in a closed system, was never transferred to another computer or device, and was wiped from the hard drive with high-tech information security software. Deleting a file on a computer or phone merely changes the file label, and the computer acts as though the space that file takes up is free space. The file still exists in its entirety until something else overwrites it. Every server those photos had to pass through to get from the originating phone or computer to their destination retained a copy of those files. The backups of those servers have copies of those files. Anyone who downloaded the images from the internet has copies. Any backups they made of their computer contain copies of the image. As computer systems are upgraded, those files will be rewritten in whatever new machine code is necessary for that computer to continue to read the file. Due to recursion digital images have just as much staying power as their analogue counterparts. Conversely, the dusty stacks of photos and negatives in people’s homes are just as likely to fade from social consciousness as any digital image is.
References
Harper, Douglas. 2012. Visual Sociology. New York: Routledge.