Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media : The Prosaic Image

This book explores from an aesthetic perspective how mobile phone technology, including mobile phone cameras, are used, and the impact this has on individual creativity and innovation, and on culture, sociality and aesthetics. Based on extensive original research including an ethnographic investigation of how specific images were created and distributed, it argues not that a new form of individual creativity is occurring, rather that a more distributed form of creativity now exists.

This book argues that ubiquitous media and user-created content establish a new perception of the world that can be called ‘particulate vision’, involving a different relation to reality that better represents the atomization of contemporary experience especially apparent in social media. Drawing on extensive original research including detailed ethnographic investigation of camera phone practices in Hong Kong, as well as visual analysis identifying the patterns, regularities and genres of such work, it shows how new distributed forms of creativity and subjectivity now work to shift our perceptions of the everyday. The book analyses the specific features of these new developments – the components of what can be called a ‘general aesthesia’ – and it focuses on the originality and innovation of amateur practices, developing a model for making sense of the huge proliferation of images in contemporary culture, discovering rhythms and tempo in this work and showing why it matters.