Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

JS-4

Visual Biographies in Media Communication

RC38 Biography and Society (host committee)
WG03 Visual Sociology

Language: English

Visual communication has increasingly become the way people create and exchange images of themselves in public and semi-public media, especially in so-called social networks. Bodily appearance plays an essential role in these processes, combined with texts that allow individuals new forms of expression. While these developments have been described and analysed in terms of their technologies and shifts within media studies, it is still an open question if and in what way they create new patterns and forms of biographies and images of the self. 
How does the visual self-presentation interact with narratives and discourses? How is the tension managed between the fluid communication in which snapshot photos are exchanged on a daily basis and their fixation in a chronology, through which visual biographies emerge in ways which were not necessarily intended by their actors? In other words, how does visual communication in media and social networks, hybrids of old and new media and digital storytelling interact with biographical processes? 
For this session we invite papers which deal theoretically and empirically with the biographical implications of visual communication in social networks and their inter-relations with old and new media. Posters: