Sharing Everything

The internet has always been a communal space. Even in the heady days of the dot.com bubble it was all about us - the general users not the corporate entities. This is continually reinforced through web applications such as Flickr, a site that allows people to upload and share their photographs with one another (and even specify that how they can be used by others).

Flickr is home to a lot of interesting stuff as people use it for a number of reasons: sketchbook storage, portfolios, family photo share, documentation....

In fact Flickr has arguable become the Wikipedia of social anthropology by capturing the visual culture of a global group of users. It fills the niche left by blogs and websites and often cuts through the crap that people use to puff themselves up on those types of sites.

What I find fascinating is the things people choose to document and how useful they can be without seeming to be useful at all. To explain visit this site. It is in essence a teeny visual narrative of one person's brain tumor removal surgery. The narrative ends happily and the way that it is presented, for instance the surgery pictures almost seem as though the operation was performed in this couple's bathroom or the smiling faces throughout the story allow us to read it as, I guess, a generally positive experience. This is a refreshing counterpoint to the sterility of most medical discourses.

If I had tumor and scared shitless of surgery, I think this set of photos would go a long way to alleviating my fears.