Tag Archives: social media

Lev Manovich – Instagram and Contemporary Image

Lev Manovich: photos, bio, complete CV.

Lev Manovich – Instagram and Contemporary Image

Instagram and Contemporary Image (2016) is a free new downloadable book by Lev Manovich.

The book methods combine traditional qualitative approaches of humanities and computational analysis of 16 millions of Instagram photos in 17 global cities carried out in Manovich’s lab (softwarestudies.com) since 2012.

The book chapters arebeing released online under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons license. The chapters are posted online as they are completed. (Three chapters have already been published, and two more will be added during summer 2016.)

The Real Bias Built In at Facebook 

What you see on the social media giant is based on an algorithm. It’s anything but neutral.

The Real Bias Built In at Facebook – The New York Times

The first step forward is for Facebook, and anyone who uses algorithms in subjective decision making, to drop the pretense that they are neutral. Even Google, whose powerful ranking algorithm can decide the fate of companies, or politicians, by changing search results, defines its search algorithms as “computer programs that look for clues to give you back exactly what you want.”

But this is not just about what we want. What we are shown is shaped by these algorithms, which are shaped by what the companies want from us, and there is nothing neutral about that.

Makes me think of the witch in Snow White: “Magic mirror, on the wall – who is the fairest one of all?” Read full article for a good explanation how the algorithms on Facebook (and google) are controlling what we say while pretending to be neutral

The Real Story About the Wrong Photos in #BringBackOurGirls

NY TIMES LENS BLOG, May 8, 2014
The Real Story About the Wrong Photos in #BringBackOurGirls.

A Twitter campaign using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls has focused global attention on the plight of some 276 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram. Three photos of girls have been posted and reposted thousands of times, including by the BBC and by the singer Chris Brown (who himself has had issues with anger management and violence against women).

One problem: The photos are of girls from Guinea-Bissau, more than 1,000 miles from Nigeria, who have no relationship to the kidnappings.

The use of these pictures raises troubling questions of representation, and misrepresentation. Ami Vitale, the photographer who made the original images as part of a long-term project, spoke with James Estrin on Thursday. [read more]

Basetrack: Conversation with Teru Kuwayama

Basetrack: Conversation with Teru Kuwayama – Aperture Foundation NY

In 2010, after many years of covering the war in Afghanistan, freelance photojournalist Teru Kuwayama received an invitation to embed with the First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment in Helmand Province. Although it was only the start of the counterinsurgency campaign, it was the tenth year of a long and costly war that carried on at a far remove of the daily lives of Americans in the United States. Along with four other photographers, Balazs Gardi, Tivadar Domaniczky, Omar Mullick, and Rita Leistner, Kuwayama decided to approach the embed differently, and started Basetrack, a social-media reporting project conceived to connect Marines and their families and to target the social network—friends, family, and online presence—surrounding the battalion. Most of the pictures were taken with mobile phones or inexpensive consumer-grade cameras and distributed through Basetrack’s WordPress website (being rebuilt), Flickr, and Facebook, the main Basetrack channel. [read conversation]

Basetrack vimeo channel

NY Times Lens Blog article on the project 

Another article at Graffiti of War 

>> And Teru Kuwayama is Facebook’s first Photo Community Liason.

Wanted: The networked photojournalist

From the Communications Director of Doctors Without Borders – a paradigm shift has happened and is articulated here.

Wanted: The networked photojournalist – British Journal of Photography.

Every day, I’m inundated with friend requests on Facebook and LinkedIn from photojournalists the world over inviting me to review their portfolios. They offer to provide free photos to work with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières MSF in the field in return for helping them get to cover international stories.
….
Yet, what is essential today is the ability of a photojournalist to bypass the uncertainty of the conventional news cycle and the vagaries of for-profit news outlets to reach audiences with their stories. I’m looking to hire the networked photojournalist. And their network needs to take all shapes and forms: from old (Time, The New York Times) and new (Huffington Post, GlobalPost) media clientele to social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and other distribution channels) and access to influencers (policy-makers, funders, activists, other NGOs).
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But with every industrial revolution there are trade-offs – individuality and custom artistry sacrificed at the altar of efficiency and supply-chain management. Armed with smartphones people are streaming their lives and “citizen” journalists are documenting some of the most dramatic events of our time, whether revolutions in Cairo or mass murder in Syria. Read entire story

Storyful

Storyful was founded by journalists who wanted to separate the news from the noise of the real-time web. We set out to discover the smartest conversations about world events and raise up the authentic voices on the big stories. Storyful’s golden rule is there is ALWAYS someone closer to the story. And in the last few months, we’ve worked with people at the heart of the action, capturing turning points in history in words, pictures and video. Sometimes our sources are local journalists, amateur photographers, or filmmakers. But often the people with the best view of the action are citizens in the right place at the right time. more info.

Great site I just discovered through the reporting of the London riots. I want to contact them to find out why they bury who the editorial team is. I did find a post on their blog that tells who some of their team is.