Politics of Gaze: The Image Economy Online

Description

Going beyond the cursory reasons behind why we capture images on the move, Politics of Gaze explores our contemporary practices around visual imaging and brings original conceptualisations about why we constantly capture ourselves and our environments through digital technologies. Our technologically mediated ‘everyday visuality’ has moral and ethical implications for the ways in which we construct our worlds, understand world events, represent ourselves, commodify our environments and transact these with the wider world. Through these acts we constantly negotiate our sense of aesthetics, our notions of what is private and public, our depictions of the everyday and issues of security and conflict whilst constructing moral codes for a technologically-mediated society. This book argues that we have crafted a ‘Glasshouse’ society where the forms of gaze are open-ended, promising us empowerment while making us endlessly vulnerable. Politics of Gaze is a vital resource for New Media studies and related fields such as photography, technology studies, visual communications, journalism and sociology. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Preface 1. Politics of gaze: non-stop capture and consumption on digital media Introduction The age of transcendence The glasshouse society The internet as the glasshouse Bibliography 2. New media visuality and the ‘wired body’ Introduction The wired body and the screen self From domestication to somatechnics The ethics of this new visuality Conclusion Bibliography 3. Domesticating the visual through the everyday Introduction Banal imaging and commodifying the everyday Digital media and the ‘visual turn’ Unleashing the poetics of the everyday Conclusion Bibliography 4. The ‘untamable’ non-stop capture and mediated visuality Introduction Public spectacle and the role of mobile technologies Gaze and the technologically mediated body Spectacle and the loss of aura The architecture of the non-stop capture User-generated content: from tabloidisation to ‘revolution’ Conclusion Bibliography 5. ‘Witnessing’ with digital technologies Introduction Locating morality in mediated modernity Mediated reality of distant proximity The simulation and circulation of suffering Suffering and its ‘viral’ appeal Conclusion Bibliography 6. Facebook and the image economy Introduction Image economy in social networking sites Protesting with and through images Discerning the private and public Conclusion Bibliography 7. Ethics of the image economy in the glasshouse society Introduction The pervasiveness of looking Disruptive gaze and the non-centrality of watching Regulating mobile technologies The glasshouse society Afterword Bibliography Index