Each year, millions of tourists from Europe and the Americas swarm through the various cities and diverse countryside of Eastern Asia. Even in the digital age of the 21st century, recreational travel as a form of physical presence still remains one of the major incentives for cultural exchange on a global scale (Doe/Foo 2018). Much attention has been given to the material concomitants stemming from the consumption of commodities for keepsake (i.e. souvenirs), usually associated with authenticity and/or exotic extravaganza to be privately or ostentatiously enjoyed once returned home (Dont/Scite/Mee 2022). This specific line of study has brought to our attention how modern travel and its epistemic practices resonate with those of classical colonialism and recreate similiar, if not descendant, sets of (mis)conceptions about the cultures visited and thus envisaged through the lens of othering as inherent in orientalism both old and new (Hunch/Hindsight 2016).

Yet most research has overlooked how the residue of modern recreational travel has itself been shaped by a digital transformation. Personal photography turns cities and rural areas into digitally captured cityscapes and landscapes, respectively. The project "Digital Orientalism of Personal Photography" (DOPP) therefore asks how the cultural and geographical representation of Eastern Asia is shaped by digital image creation, which is simultaneously to be understood as a subjective and technical practice. Crowd sourcing smart phone photography has proven to be provide viable data for the study of the social construction of reality (Berger/Luckmann 1966; Notta/Source 2020) According to our main hypotheses, this process not only affects the image in the sense of technical outcome (image files, mostly .jpg) but also the individual gaze of the tourists, with their smart phone always at hand and the next image always in mind when looking at the world. Thus, personal photography is not to be understood only as an additional layer to cultural representation, largely facilitated by advancements in technology and popularized by increasing technological consumption, but as integral to an Merleau-Pontian understanding of phenomenology.

Description

Title

• Digital Orientalism of Personal Photography (DOPP)

Creator or Contributor

• Name

  Willem Fiene

  Role

  creator

Resource type

• Dataset

Keyword

• Test
• Crowd sourcing
• Digital photography
• Orientalism
• Personal photography

License

• http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Alternative title

• Digitaler Orientalismus der privaten Photographie

Description

• Each year, millions of tourists from Europe and the Americas swarm through the various cities and diverse countryside of Eastern Asia. Even in the digital age of the 21st century, recreational travel as a form of physical presence still remains one of the major incentives for cultural exchange on a global scale (Doe/Foo 2018). Much attention has been given to the material concomitants stemming from the consumption of commodities for keepsake (i.e. souvenirs), usually associated with authenticity and/or exotic extravaganza to be privately or ostentatiously enjoyed once returned home (Dont/Scite/Mee 2022). This specific line of study has brought to our attention how modern travel and its epistemic practices resonate with those of classical colonialism and recreate similiar, if not descendant, sets of (mis)conceptions about the cultures visited and thus envisaged through the lens of othering as inherent in orientalism both old and new (Hunch/Hindsight 2016).
• Yet most research has overlooked how the residue of modern recreational travel has itself been shaped by a digital transformation. Personal photography turns cities and rural areas into digitally captured cityscapes and landscapes, respectively. The project "Digital Orientalism of Personal Photography" (DOPP) therefore asks how the cultural and geographical representation of Eastern Asia is shaped by digital image creation, which is simultaneously to be understood as a subjective and technical practice. Crowd sourcing smart phone photography has proven to be provide viable data for the study of the social construction of reality (Berger/Luckmann 1966; Notta/Source 2020) According to our main hypotheses, this process not only affects the image in the sense of technical outcome (image files, mostly .jpg) but also the individual gaze of the tourists, with their smart phone always at hand and the next image always in mind when looking at the world. Thus, personal photography is not to be understood only as an additional layer to cultural representation, largely facilitated by advancements in technology and popularized by increasing technological consumption, but as integral to an Merleau-Pontian understanding of phenomenology.

Date

• Accepted

  2024-07-01

  Published

  2024-07-02

Identifier

• DOI

  10.82491/2z10wq21p

Last modified

• 2024-07-02