ABSTRACT
The non-ephemeral amateur media and its constructions of self are concerned with several theoretical approaches that position ephemeral (new and amateur) media as a functional social tool and a deceptive theoretical and technological construct. Amateur media makers opting for anonymity and the ephemerality, or time-restricted distribution, of their records indicate a choice for a renewable, non-punishable freedom of expression. This leads to cases of political, sexual and racial abuse, to name just a few strands, often reaching high levels of (involuntary) online archivability, whether due to active legal frameworks or to pervasive cultural and visual priming processes that preserve the original media records – from selfies translating impudence and narcissism, to scenes documenting acts of terrorism or domestic abuse. Rather than being concerned with a review of media-recording developments that, at some point or another, relegated the ‘new media’ technology as obsolete and impractical, and its feasibility as just another ephemeral recording mode, this chapter explores how several pervasive cognitive and cultural frameworks allow the current amateur new media-periscoping behaviour. Also explored are issues of access to media technology, distribution and in-situ discovery in relation to modes of perception that determine the ephemerality as a common interpretative ground and the subsequent historic merit of amateur images. In this context, it is argued that both old and new media can function as para-texts that are highly ‘recyclable’. Across most geopolitical visual priming processes, and their respective subsequent visual literacies, such para-texts define renewed acts of self-referential memory-building as well as ongoing reinterpretations of a private and/or collective past identities.
