Michaela Fišerová
(Department of Media studies, Metropolitan University, Prague; Department of Electronic Culture a Semiotics, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague)
Abstract:
In my paper, I focus on digital photographs, which are massively shared on contemporary social networks. I propose to grasp the instantly taken and shared photos (snap-shots) as a melancholic technology, which generates visual remains of everyday events. According to my hypothesis, the practice of sharing of vital fragments is supposed to keep the participating users of social networks socially “alive” – more fragments of their lives they share on their “profiles”, more they ask for attention and social acceptance of their lives. The proposed reflection issues from rhetorical understanding of photography as visual metonymy, but it is also strongly inspired by Derridian reflections on recording technologies as on supplementary remains of past events, which are supposed to satisfy the metaphysical desire to grasp individual events and make them socially “present”.
Michaela Fišerová, Ph.D. is a Czech philosopher. She works mostly in the fields of visual studies and contemporary French philosophy, particularly deconstruction and poststructuralism. Her ongoing research concerns rhetorical and social aspects of the problematics of visuality and image, especially photography and signature. She is the author of monographs Partager le visible. Repenser Foucault (Paris: L’Harmattan 2013), Image and Power. Interviews with French Thinkers (Prague: Karolinum 2015) and Deconstructing Signature. Jacques Derrida and Repeating of the Unrepeatable (Prague: Togga 2016). She also publishes in philosophical journals Filozofia (Bratislava, Slovakia) and Philosophy Today (Chicago, USA).