My Flickr
This is a photo from my last New Year's Eve, in Chicago. A friend from Paris came in the US to visit me and we decided to spend a few days in Chicago. We had absolutely no plans to celebrate the new year and by chance, someone that I met randomly in the bus invited us to a party. The place was a warehouse, in the middle of nothing, and there were hundreds of people. We had the big surprise to find an almost professional music studio upstairs in that place and this photo was taken. There were also many keybords, drums, and as you can see, many guitars.
I heard of the Flickr for the first time when a friend of mine asked me if she could put a picture of me on her Flickr page. I had no idea of what she was talking about so she showed me her photos, and I spent a few hours (!) going from pictures to pictures, on different people pages. However, I never created an account after that, and I never thought about that before this assignment. The concept of uploading, tagging, classifying and sharing photos may be good, but even if a have a lot of photos, I am still very old fashioned and I like to make them printed and to look at them in a real album.
Once again, I am not certainly sure that I completely got the concept of Folksonomy, but I think I have the main ideas. I agree with many people in the sence that I like seeing Internet as a more and more democratic place, in the hands of the users, but I still have a small doubt. As Sturtz says : "classification inherently carries social, political and economic implications", and "the democratic approach of a folksonomy avoids many of the ethical and political concerns of centrally imposed systems". However, refering to Gurak (I don't find the page again, I'll put it here soon), we have to keep in mind that Internet users often belong to the same social or economic categories and that a lot of categories are not represented. In conclusion, I don't think that we can speak of a real democracy, as a lot of voices are not represented. Hum, I don't know if that was very clear...
Comments
I second your remark about real democracy not existing since many voices are still not represented (like about 85% of the global population*, not counting people who are equipped to put images on the internet, and simply choose not to). I worry that the internet is too often just another way to spread mainstream western values around the world, to make what we post seem like what ought to be the norm for everyone. It was lots easier to pretend gay people didn't exist before it was common to see GLBT characters on mainstream TV, so does the fact that the images poor people might post are missing make it easier for the average internet user to pretend poverty doesn't exist?
*http://www.internetworldstats.com/top25.htm
(how do I make a link in a comment?)
Posted by: elizabeth | January 26, 2007 05:50 PM