I have been blogging for about three years, seriously for about two. I usually post once or twice a week and my followers are typically friends and family with a few extraneous foreigners sometimes. Being a writing type of gal, my blogs have always been almost exclusively text-based; I've probably posted four or five pictures the entire time I've been at it. But that doesn't really seem to cut it in the blog-o-sphere these days. When I logged into my "Blogger Dashboard" (because, apparently, we bloggers need lingo, or jargon in anthropology terms) to create this blog, the template it suggested to me was a "Mosaic" where the hope page would be tiles of images that were associated with each post. This, quite incorrectly for me, assumes that bloggers have an image to go with each of their posts.
Katz (2006) predicted that mobile devices would shift society towards a "phenomenology of image" from the "phenomenology of a printed text." Clearly this shift is pervading the internet, as one of the most closely connected technologies to the mobile device since the rise of smart phones. Pulling up a block of text on a hand-held device is overwhelming cumbersome, and not satisfying to America's fast-fact fetish. However, pulling up a mosaic of images that allow the user to navigate around and read the posts based on the interest they have in the associated pictures seems to sound much more appealing.
Rants from Mommyland has clearly felt the shift, too. Scarce are the posts with no image accompaniment even though their posts can still get a little wordy. What Mommyland excels at is incorporating internet memes into their posts. Memes are the new visual language of the web. The images have specific meanings and their use is often ideologically monitored. Sites like Reddit are remarkable examples of the implementation of an apparatus to enforce ideology. If a user makes a post that does not abide by the written, or unwritten, "code" of the site, other users will absolutely decimate the poster, usually in an attempt to shame them into removing the offending post and maybe leaving the community all together.
Scrolling down the page in Mommyland one is confronted with a barrage of photos, memes, info-graphics, .gifs, logos, and other images. The phenomenology of image has taken hold.
- Alexandra
Rants from Mommyland has clearly felt the shift, too. Scarce are the posts with no image accompaniment even though their posts can still get a little wordy. What Mommyland excels at is incorporating internet memes into their posts. Memes are the new visual language of the web. The images have specific meanings and their use is often ideologically monitored. Sites like Reddit are remarkable examples of the implementation of an apparatus to enforce ideology. If a user makes a post that does not abide by the written, or unwritten, "code" of the site, other users will absolutely decimate the poster, usually in an attempt to shame them into removing the offending post and maybe leaving the community all together.
Scrolling down the page in Mommyland one is confronted with a barrage of photos, memes, info-graphics, .gifs, logos, and other images. The phenomenology of image has taken hold.
- Alexandra
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