Networking Imagery As a Means of Communication in Social Media

Abstract

During the last decade, new media have become aggregators of visual content which translates socio-cultural meanings, practices of vision and techniques of watching and communication styles in real-time. Nowadays it is possible to analyze a multitude of universes existing on the Internet, diverse in their content, with unique voices and their particular ways of visual self-presentation on a cyber space. With the development of social media, visual practices replace “networking talks”, and these practices fix polyphony, polystylism, and the fragmented nature of modern times, while at the same time being the expression of collective and individual needs. Visual users’ content has acquired a new status: it has turned from a means of representing and documenting events into a means of “pure communicating” with the help of which information is shortened and simplified, and interaction is constructed in line with social expectations and norms. In general, it indicates the ongoing cultural transformations associated with the transition from representational system of culture to presentational online culture.