ABSTRACT
Critiques of social media and Web 2.0 have thrown into doubt some of the assumptions made about user-based or user-centric agency. By characterising technoculture less in terms of supposed shift from analogue to digital technology and more in terms of a move towards ubiquitous computing, the author reframes mass photography within the key terms of ubiquity, notably: ambience, augmentation, automation and animation. The quotidian, the vernacular is thus contested ground and amateurism is a route to an automated, ambient, animated and augmented existence designed according to the imperatives not of technology per se, but of surveillance-based markets. It is not simply that the apps the people prosume very largely do our picture-making for the reader, but that they contribute to reordering of the reader as prosuming subjects becoming data objects for markets. The aspirational amateur is always already de/enrolled.
