Social Media and Photography

I’ve been invited to speak on Saturday at the Social Media and Photography one-day conference at the London College of Communication (LCC), part of the University of Arts, London. My brief is to give an overview of social media for the students at LCC while other speakers will be looking more specifically at photography within social media, such as Flickr and Photosynth.

Here’s the summary:

“Forms of social media, in which the user is also the author, are transforming the role of photography in contemporary culture. On sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace and Second World users generate and share content, eemingly side-stepping the influence of corporations, governments and editors&;though new forms of censorship are on the rise. What attitudes and assumptions are built into the structures of existing forms of social media? What can we learn about ourselves, our moment in history, and about photography (and video) from looking at social media more carefully?

Speakers will include Roger Hargreaves, Yang-May Ooi, Alan Sekers, Craig Smith, Lucy Soutter and Paul Tebbs.”

The conference is organised by my friend Lucy Soutter, an art photographer and a lecturer in photography at LCC, and the other speakers are her professor colleagues. I’m looking forward to hearing what they are going to talk about as it will be a great opportunity to learn from some academic experts.

In my session, I’m going to focus on what social media means for creative artists and those working in the creative industries, especially where a lot of content on the web is created for free and distributed for free.

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For those attending the conference, you can download the slides from my presentation Social Media: Free for All? - the password will be available at the conference.

lccsm