Flickr Experiment

Flickr is, like said in class, Facebook on steroids. Just instead of posting pictures of your drunken weekend so your friends can see all the fun you’ve been having, Flickr offers you a place to put all of those other pictures. Although it was bitterly cold out today, I still thought that this project was pretty cool. I wish we had been given more time to think of an idea and to actually organize the photos. I feel like with more time to think about it we would have gotten more out of the assignment. Since we only had 10 minutes or so to think of an idea, we decided that Kirkwood would be our best option, but we weren’t sure exactly what yet. So we went online an looked up so pictures of Kirkwood and found this Flickr-like photo gallery of construction on Kirkwood years ago. We noticed that a lot of the places in the picture were no longer there, that Kirkwood Avenue has changed a lot in the past couple of years. So the idea was born, a then-and-now of Kirkwood. It wasn’t hard, once you got the lay of the land on the website. In this case, it is very similar to Facebook, so making an album wasn’t hard at all. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/23825962@N08/sets/72157603900636390/)
Flickr can be used in several ways that would make it an effective tool in user-generated content. Like I said earlier, Facebook albums can go only so far to convey a message and that message usually is “look how pretty I look tonight!” Flickr, on the other hand, is more of a “I was just in the right spot at the right time, with my camera,” type of thing. It just so happens that I missed the CPE in France, mainly because I have class and I don’t live anywhere near France. Without Flickr, I would have never been able to see those pictures that the first assigned article is showing. With that said, it is pretty clear that Flickr can and will be used for citizen-based photojournalism. Since almost everyone has a camera with them at all times, whether it be a handheld or in your phone, it seems inevitable that a number of people are going to catch some form of news that the camera crews aren’t going to catch. Flickr now gives these people the medium they have always needed to organize and display these pictures in a way that will get what they saw out there.