Ubiquitous Photography and Web 3.0 (Flickr and the Culture of Connectivity - Jose van Dijck)

'Share your pictures, watch the world' - Flickr's motto.

The culture of connectivity can be found through various social media platforms such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook Twitter, and Flickr.  Platforms such as Flickr are firmly embedded in a culture of connectivity, a culture where the common practices of social networking sites are becoming part of our daily routine through sharing images and past stories.

Individually uploaded content is transformed to shared perspectives, experiences and memories. 

Web 3.0 -  the way in which internet is progressing as connective intelligence; connecting data, concepts, applications and ultimately people. 

The link with Web 3.0 to Ubiquitous Photography involves how modern technology, such as smart phones, has allowed for images to be captured and uploaded to the internet in mere seconds. In  this day and age, everyone can be considered a photographer as we all have easy access to a camera.

We can see why van Dijck argues for the existence of a 'culture of connectivity'. Through social media platforms where images are uploaded, seemingly infinitely, 'infinite connections' are created amongst users. These connections are also ubiquitous.

Joachim Schmid 

Schmid is a Berlin-based artist who works in 'found photography'. In the examples below, Schmid has found two images and placed them together to create a new image. He found these images by creating an 'institute' that offered to safely recycle or reuse dangerous film and photos. This was received worldwide attention and he was sent people's unwanted photographs. The images in his Photogenic Drafts (1991) were taken from an archive of a commercial portrait studio, but all the negatives has been cut in half, so he used two halves of different images to create a whole one.

In this example above, we can see the face of a young girl has been fused together with an older woman who was wearing glasses. This image raises questions around age and identity. By placing these images of compatible head shots together, it evokes thoughts of who the young girl will grow up to be in the future.

Penlope Umbrico 

Umbrico is known for appropriating (using pre-existing objects with little or no transformation in art) images that she's found through image sharing social networks and search engines.

In the example above, Suns from Flickr, she found 541795 images of sunsets, using the word 'sunset' to search through the social networking site Flickr. This search transpired to show the most photographed subject. I believe this work shows the culture of connectivity in action. We've all become photographers who happened to share the connection of taking an image of the sun. Umbrico has highlighted the ubiquity in this.