«Comunicazioni sociali», 2016, n. 1, 3-14 © 2016 Vita e Pensiero / Pubblicazioni dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore ADRIANO D’ALOIA* - FRANCESCO PARISI** SNAPSHOT CULTURE The Photographic Experience in the Post-Medium Age 1. post post-photography From the 2000s onwards, the experience of photography has changed radically because of various social and technological events: the embedding of cameras into multimedia and multifunction mobile devices, the expansion of photographs’ arena of visibility to the Internet, and the spread of easy-to-use photo-editing software for both desktop com- puters and mobile devices. In today’s convergent digitalized mediascape, built-in cam- eras, social-networking sites and smart apps have made photography more accessible, ubiquitous, public, cheap, democratic and engaging than ever before, paving the way for a renewal of photographic experience. Our everyday life is a “life more photographic”: photography is everywhere – around us as an environment, attached to us as an exten- sion of our physical and perceptual faculties, and inside us as a framework for memory, identity and affect 1 . On one hand, social and media mutations have set the scene for the emergence of experimental and non-professional practices that have progressively reshaped photogra- phy’s spatiotemporal and sociocultural boundaries: editing, iltering, remixing, posting, sharing, tagging, commenting etc., have became part of our natural everyday behaviour. A new ‘extended photographic agency’ has arisen. Indeed, as we take and publish a photograph with our smartphone, we are not only content-generator users, but also so- cial-media managers, layout artists and graphic designers of our own online proiles, walls and blogs. Rather than ‘users’, we are intuitive developers or even digital artists, as we work directly on materials, code and technologies to manipulate our own or oth- ers’ content or to create new artefacts. Rather than ‘collectors’ of images, we are ‘ar- chivists’ of our own big database, a distributed repository of computational information that constantly needs to be organized, tagged, cleaned and synchronized. New aesthetic objects have appeared in the media environment. Animated GIFs, cinemagraphs, selies, time-lapses, picspams, etc., are concrete manifestations of a cre- ative agency that centres on photography. But as these hybrid objects demonstrate, digi- tal has re-set the fracture between handmade (pictorial, artiicial) and mechanical imag- * Università Telematica Internazionale UniNettuno – adriano.daloia@uninettunouniversity.net. Author of sections 1, 2 and 4. ** Università degli Studi di Messina – fparisi@unime.it. Author of section 3. 1 D. Rubenstein, K. Sluis, “A Life More Photographic”, Photographies, 18, 2-3 (2008): 9-28; M. Hand, Ubiquitous Photography. Digital Media and Society Series, Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 2012, 11-15; J. van Dijck, “Flickr and the Culture of Connectivity: Sharing Views, Experiences, Memories”, Memory Studies, 4, 4 (2011): 410-415.