“Share your Life in Photos.” Pretty sweet idea, Flickr. Most of us have gotten used to sharing ourselves- our digital selves, anyway. Creating a Flickr account means a Flickr persona, as well. If I sign up (and more on that below), am I signing up as a fun friend (I’ve tried to keep those pictures from Andersonville off the net, but to no avail) as a mom (and how many bragging pictures of Max reading The Communist Manifesto can my acquaintances suffer?). Or am I someone new?

As a teen, staging, developing, and showcasing pictures was an important part of my friendish community. We scrapbooked- before it became a trending hobby for our mothers- and shared our books around, evaluating and commenting on them. Recently, a friend was visiting me, and she saw my -now ragged- scrapbook from 1995. We pulled it out and spent the evening with a bottle of wine, telling stories and cracking up.

Flickr makes it easy to share, but I wonder if that ease takes something away. My friend could not have pulled my Flickr account off my bookshelf, and with the wealth of images and info available on the internet, how much impact would my silly pictures really have?

But what if I needed a space to show pictures that maybe I wouldn’t want my mother to see? Or pictures that RL friends might not care about. As I poked around Flickr, I saw a lot of pictures of everyday life, some impressive photography, and of course…kittens. Digging a little deeper, I found a wealth of internet silliness- hot guys with “artistically” wet pants, families cosplaying My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and impassioned photo-journals outlining who Harry Potter really should have ended up with (and that one’s, well, not really NSFW but maybe NSF opening around people you want to respect you).

These images illustrate one of the interesting divergences of Flickr. This is not just a medium in which individuals share the same analog pictures with the same RL people. Fannish personas build image-based communities that are not a digital version of family albums but function more like digital ‘zines.

So no, I’m not signing up for Flickr. I don’t really want a Yahoo account, and signing in via FB allows Yahoo to post “as you” (as if!). I will, however, delight in the quirky ways that people have found to Share their Lives in Photos.

The “Republic of Letters,” so important in the formation of the public sphere, was marked by a proliferation of printed materials. In “Zograscopes and the Mapping of Polite Society,” Erin C. Blake builds on Habermas’ ideas of an emerging eighteenth century “public sphere constituted by private people” as a “polite society,” one engaged not only with verbal mediums but with the visual.

Blake describes the 1740s and 50s “3-D gadget craze” of the zograscopes. These devices (shown left) projected 3-D images to a single viewer, creating a virtual reality. Blake’s research of hundreds of advertisements illustrates that these images were overwhelmingly concerned with urban and other public spaces. It is this confluence of private viewers and public images that bolsters Blake’s assertions of the place of these devices in the formation of a “polite” subjectivity.

Through the zagrascope, a limited number of middle and upper class Britons imagined themselves as part of a “polite society” which was mapped and bounded by zagrascopic imagery. 3-D projections of place, Blake suggests, allowed for a representation of “intersections of mobile elements” to create a knowable space.

Zagrascoping only trended for a decade. It was limited in time and, ironically, scope. Blake acknowledges that this technology does not mark a paradigm shift of viewing practices, since the devices were not widely owned. It’s timing is critical, however. The specifically public images conveyed standards of polite society to viewers; they can be seen as a private crash course in the new “public sphere.” There existed layers of instruction embedded in this technology- the images themselves were coded with visual cues for proper public behaviors, as well as signifying a list of appropriate public places to visit. The devices themselves required instructions, which began in their advertisements. People had to be informed of the need for such a viewing experience.

Blake’s work not only re-imagines the history of 3-D technology, it also adds to conversations begun by Habermas. The primacy of the written word in the history of enlightenment and modernity is complicated by assessments of old “new” media which captured the zeitgeist of the age.

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.” - Oscar Wilde

As I’m nearing the end of my PhD coursework and contemplating leaping (Indiana Jones like) across the precipitous chasm of dissertation research, this quote haunts my waking hours. Semester after semester, I have earnestly hit the books, written the reviews, faithfully lauded Foucault and Marx. I have learned the lingo- problematized the hegemony, analyzed the materiality and deconstructed the binary. Sometimes I was so bold as to posit the signifigance of things that happened…in the past.

Those halcyon days are passed. Clever historiographical arguments have gotten me this far, and in a pinch I could always reposition the discourse with a simple query of “sure…but what about gender?” No more.

As I research and re-write ongoing work on Southern Women’s Civil War journals, and plan for proposing a dissertation with unlikely and obscure hobo subjects, this blog will expose the terrifying inner workings of my research process, my paralyzing fear of archivists, debilitating depth of secondary sources, and crippling self-doubt.

Welcome to Grad School!