What We Find Beautiful

Originally uploaded by QuiverandQuill

We take thousands of pictures, share hundreds of tweets and create many conferences to celebrate our every day lives. What has made the mundane something worthy of constant attention? Are we afraid to forget or just eager to be the first to document? Where once we filmed occasions, now we film moments.

Many of us write descriptions of our content when posting it online. We create tags and share the location where our media was conceived. We are aware that when our moments combine with the moments of others online we create a more significant story. Perhaps this awareness encourages us to share the ordinary, because we know its power and beauty when combined with the ordinary that others post online. Flickr tags are a perfect example of this.

Why we tag on Flickr?
1. Ego. We want our photos to be discoverable and attributed to us. We want to drive traffic to our blogs, promote the recognition of our talents and leave a fingerprint on the window of history.
2. Narrative / storytelling. We have a sense that our pictures help to tell a story greater than us, the pictures create a sense of meaning for a place and a time. When we overlay them on a map we see the richness they add to something much larger than us—it is our way of contributing to a group story.

I have heard much talk recently of ambient awareness through twitter, Flickr and other social networks. In fact, I have heard ambient awareness offered as a sort of ROI of social media.

We need to also consider the greater meaning we realize by contributing to the overall story—how our tweets, blogs, pictures, all the beautiful substance of the mundane, add to a larger much richer and much fuller whole than the single piece of content.

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