Pocket & palm photography: New frames of social witnessing

ICTs in general 1 Minute

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Just over a month since I last gave a public presentation at the American Centre, I spoke today (along with Anush and Iromi from The Picture Press) around the evolution of smartphone photography – calling it ‘Pocket and palm photography’ (download high quality PDF here).

I quickly went through a history of photographic technology from film to digital, and within digital, from the digital camera to phones with increasingly sophisticated optics. Building on this incredible evolution in technology, I explored key dynamics of an explosive global and local growth in smartphone photography. I then flagged the democratisation of photographic production, dissemination and consumption, the ubiquity of geo-tagged photos that is largely the result of smartphone cameras, the growth in smartphone camera apps and sophisticated software filters, the immediacy and ease with which anyone with a mobile Internet connection could share photos, the vastly reduced cost of production and as a result of increasingly inexpensive smartphone availability, the prevalence of photography amongst youth, and even younger children.

In some detail, I then explored some of the implications of these developments, and then flagged several key Sri Lankan examples of smartphone photographic platforms and communities (around, for example, Instagram) and what they chose to focus on.

Finally, I looked into the near future and submitted that what we took for granted as the capabilities of smartphone cameras today would tomorrow be worn or biometrically implanted, leading to vital questions around privacy, ethics and rights in an age where photographing was omnipresent.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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  1. Pingback: The Evolution of Photography | Globe Drifting

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