ABSTRACT
We live in a culture, in Western Europe, ever more mediated by the visual. Photographic images surround us on all sides: newspapers, magazines, advertising hoardings, the Internet and if one includes the moving image: television, film, video, and computer games. The evolution of digital media now results in the majority of people in Europe always carrying a camera with them, as an integral part of their mobile phone. Within the computer, traditional boundaries between media breakdown and merge with the facility to digitise information and easily combine images and sound, both original and sampled. Individuals can then post their work on websites and publish to the worldwide Internet audience. Social networking sites such as Facebook, video-sharing sites such as YouTube and photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, as well as individual's personal websites and blogs offer the opportunity to share images with family, friends and audiences previously unimaginable. Digital technologies have provided the means to communicate easily through images, text and voice. Is this the longed-for democratisation of the image?
