From Family Albums to Global Search Engines: Translating Family Photographs for the Digital Age

This thesis examines the ways digital photo-sharing platforms adopt, use and challenge the discourse of the material family album as a way of demonstrating the uses for new media within the private sphere. It analyses the digital photo-sharing platforms of Picasa and Shutterfly, platforms which often take contrasting approaches to negotiating the relationship between material and digital cultures. By examining these platforms in terms of the way they reference and use the discourse of the material family album, the ways they allow content to be used and accessed, and their relationship to commercial culture, this thesis explores how these platforms use the discourse to transform the way the family and the family album interact with one another, and with geography, time and commercial culture. It argues that the discourse of the material family album is translated by digital photo-sharing platforms in order to ensure the family participates in the digital sphere, drawing more of human communication into the online space where it can be mediatized, observed, and commodified. The thesis begins by defining the discourse of the material family album, drawing on the ways the family album is commonly described in academic literature. It identifies a common discourse in discussions of the family album which suggests a particular way of thinking about the album’s functions and practices. The second chapter explores the ways digital photo-sharing platforms adopt and translate this discourse, and give these social practices a visual, media form. These platforms draw the family into the digital sphere by abstracting these practices from the material world and rendering them visible in their interfaces. As a result of this, however, the practices become subject to an increasing degree of standardisation and control from outside the family. The third chapter addresses the issue of access to family albums in both the material and digital contexts. It argues that the benefits of using digital interfaces lie in how they enable a reinterpretation of the significance of geography and time to both the album and its viewers. The characteristics of new media therefore challenge how access to the album was granted and refused in the material world. The final chapter explores the relationship between the family album and commerce, and argues that the commodification of the family album and the practices involved in creating them are perhaps the strongest driving factor in the desire to connect the family with new media and the internet. When the discourse of the material family album is realised within digital photo-sharing platforms, the relationship between family albums and commodities is changed, meaning digital photo-sharing within the commercially owned platforms of Picasa and Shutterfly involve families and their leisure activities more and more strongly in the world of commerce.