Understanding Online Images: Content, context and circulation as analytic foci

This chapter takes as its focus the contemporary phenomenon of generating, sharing and consuming visual accounts of social life in online media and the analytic challenges this presents for visual researchers. The emergence of new online cultures and social networking sites, and the affordances these offer for creating, modifying and circulating visual content, recalls Mirzoeff’s (2011: 14) suggestion for a critical examination of how institutions and individuals mobilise specific forms of visuality to order the world and the ways individuals themselves reproduce or resist these ways of seeing. A central concern of this chapter is, therefore, to understand what social relations are produced, reproduced and resisted by the production and circulation of images online and what methodological tools might be required to understand these processes as they become increasingly significant in the mundane routines of everyday life.