THE SOCIAL MEDIA IMAGE:MODES OF VISUAL ORDERING ON SOCIAL MEDIA

[摘要] My dissertation considers the organization of large sets of user-generated photographs across social media platforms, and delineates the ways in which time and place are mediated through their presentation and analyses. Addressing the unprecedented scale of social media visual expressions, together with their implementation, structure and presentation within specific media platforms, I examine how visual social media data is processed, structured, and presented, and theorize the consequences of these forms for the ways we culturally understand and experience contemporary visual information. Taking an integrated approach, this work offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis, and draws on methodologies from media theory, information science, software studies, art history, cultural studies, and computer science. I combine distant critical reading of larger organizational patterns and their cultural meanings (studying visual arrangement in exiting platforms, experimental computational research, and artistic works) with a close analytical reading of groups of photos, using computational and visualization tools. This twin process allows me to develop my theoretical understanding based on particular results, but also illustrates the problem that is the focus of this dissertation: how to understand new visual production scales, their organizations, and their interpretation.

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh