{"id":1212,"date":"2017-04-20T09:13:52","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T09:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?p=1212"},"modified":"2019-05-17T06:38:08","modified_gmt":"2019-05-17T06:38:08","slug":"family-photographs-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?p=1212","title":{"rendered":"Family Photographs Online"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It did seem reasonable to me, for a long time, that a website showing family photographs would be a way of stimulating an exchange among family members (the only viewers to whom the images could mean anything at all). \u00a0So I tried it. \u00a0It didn&#8217;t work, to put it mildly. \u00a0In roughly two years there were\u00a0<em>no comments at all<\/em> on any of the actual photographs! Last summer I pulled the plug on it.<\/p>\n<p>I really might have known better. Despite my enthusiasm for Flusser&#8217;s thinking about history and photography and my long admiration for Walter Ong&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Technologizing of the Word,<\/em> in which he describes the unbridgeable differences between oral and literate cultures, I completely missed the point: Family photographs belong to <em>oral<\/em> culture. \u00a0It&#8217;s a <em>secondary<\/em> orality (Ong&#8217;s phrase), yes, which is to say writing is still around, effective, relevant. \u00a0But it&#8217;s orality all the same; on-line &#8220;dialogue&#8221; is just about the opposite&#8211;it&#8217;s written and more, it&#8217;s effectively\u00a0<em>published<\/em>. They are very, very different cultures&#8211;different at a level so deep that most of us never notice. That&#8217;s what &#8220;naturalised&#8221; means. \u00a0 It&#8217;s very lucky that I came across Martha Langford&#8217;s book\u00a0<em>Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums<\/em>, 2001 (Kingston and Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queens University Press). \u00a0She named the key conditions of possiblity for making family photographs meaningful, basing her arguments on Ong and McLuhan, and she was very, very convincing!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It did seem reasonable to me, for a long time, that a website showing family photographs would be a way of stimulating an exchange among family members (the only viewers to whom the images&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":616,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[85,76,230,227,233,231,232,228,229],"class_list":["post-1212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-photography","tag-dialogue","tag-family-photographs","tag-marshall-mcluhan","tag-martha-langford","tag-online-dialogue","tag-orality","tag-secondary-orality","tag-suspended-conversations","tag-walter-ong"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}