Exploring the Life Cycle of Smartphone Images from Camera Rolls to Social Media Platforms

Recent critiques contend that “Far too much current writing on photography—even in pieces about social media and photography—fixate on professional photographers,” so this piece seeks to buck that trend by focusing on ordinary smartphone owners and how they use their mobile devices to capture or create, stylize, and represent their worlds. More specifically, this study examines the “life cycle” of images from capture or creation on the device to potential editing and sharing on social media. It does so through a multimethod, qualitative approach that blends an examination of the users’ camera rolls and images they post to social media platforms with in-depth interviews to contexualize and explain their practices. The results indicate that the ordinary individuals in this sample created vastly more images than they shared and that they used their mobile devices chiefly to preserve memories, document new or unusual experiences, preserve inspiration, provide accountability or evidence, and to create visual media as a stand-in for verbal communication. Of the images they did share, ones with common reference points were most likely to be distributed, followed by ones showing new, rare or unusual experiences, ones that were unified or consistent with other images previously posted, and images that flattered the uploader.