Simon Faulkner

Chatting through pictures? A classification of images tweeted in one week in the UK and USA

Twitter is used by a substantial minority of the populations of many countries to share short messages, sometimes including images. Nevertheless, despite some research into specific images, such as selfies, and a few news stories about specific tweeted photographs, little is known about the types of images that are routinely shared. In response, this article reports a content analysis of random samples of 800 images tweeted from the UK or USA during a week at the end of 2014. Although most images were photographs, a substantial minority were hybrid or layered image forms: phone screenshots, collages, captioned pictures, and pictures of text messages. About half were primarily of one or more people, including 10% that were selfies, but a wide variety of other things were also pictured. Some of the images were for advertising or to share a joke but in most cases the purpose of the tweet seemed to be to share the minutiae of daily lives, performing the function of chat or gossip, sometimes in innovative ways.

The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists and Photography edited by Mike Robinson and David Picard

In June 2007 I was taken by an Israeli artist friend on what he called a ‘critical tour’ of Jerusalem, the final leg of which was a drive to see a concrete section of the West Bank Barrier where it cut across the Jerusalem-Jericho road in Abu Dis. On this particular research trip I had forgotten the charger for my digital camera. I was convinced that I needed my own photographs of Jerusalem and especially of the Barrier; consequently I felt compelled to rush around Tel Aviv the day before searching for a disposable camera. In retrospect, given the poor quality of the photographs that resulted from the use of this camera, these actions seem a bit absurd. Later in 2007, I spoke at a conference at Al Quds University in Abu Dis, where the Barrier runs just outside the university entrance and alongside the campus. When the minibus bringing delegates from the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem arrived at the university its occupants divided into two groups, those who immediately lit cigarettes and those who began to take photographs of the Barrier. I fell into the latter group, though I also took photographs of people taking photographs of the Barrier. These two incidents were among the things I thought about as I read the collection The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists and Photography, for they are suggestive of some of the issues addressed in this volume. I was not a straightforward tourist in Abu Dis. Nonetheless, I have often feared that my current research on visual culture and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict borders on a kind of ‘Dark Tourism’ involving a curious satisfaction in the miseries and traumas of others. Certainly this aspect of my attraction to this conflict situation came to the fore on the occasions mentioned here. Moreover, these anecdotes point to three characteristics of intersections between tourists, tourism and photography explored in The Framed World. First, such intersections are often organized around locations that have a broad visual currency as icons. Second, tourists usually want to make their own photographs of these locations. And, third, the practices of tourist photography and tourism in general have their own politics, a politics that also intersects with wider political contests. None of these points are especially new when it comes to the discussion of the visual culture of tourism and the relationship between tourism and photography in particular. Yet The Framed World brings these concerns into greater focus in relation to a series of specific cases and methodological approaches. Thinking about my visit to the Al Quds University campus, I am convinced that my fellow conference delegates and I were partaking in a practice akin to the normal touristic encounter with a tourist site, through which the use of photography feeds off and reinforces the photographically generated ‘aura’ of that location. This ‘aura’ involves the combination of the phenomenal experience of the actual site with its existence as a place-image within a dispersed field of visual images. Our photographs of the Barrier replicated its existence as an image within myriad other professional and amateur photographs, adding to them and consolidating