Sensory experiences of digital photo-sharing: ‘‘Mundane frictions’’ and emerging learning strategies

Digital technologies are increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life forming part of the way we live and experience the world. This article will scrutinize how specifically mobile phone cameras, digital photographing and the use of web-based photo-sharing sites and communities become part of the meaning making practices through which the everyday is lived and understood. In doing so, I advance the concept of ‘mundane friction’ through which to discuss the experience, meaning-making and pedagogy generated through operating screen-based technologies. Indeed media participates in everyday worlds beyond its role as a provider of content and for communication. The question that will be addressed here is how this media presence can be understood from an embodied and sensory perspective, and is based in a study of sensory aspects of teenagers use of web-based photo-diaries. Further, this discussion leads to questions of how an appreciation of digital visuality as more than representational acknowledge the meaning of mundane friction caused by habitually touching, rubbing, clicking, pinching through media technologies as part of the sensory emplacement process that establish people as situated learners. In turn, problematizing this tangible friction as pivotal for understanding digital visuality, gives reason to argue for research methods that acknowledge digital visual material as more-than-visual and theory that moves toward the unspoken, tacit and sensory elements of learning in everyday practices. Thus, the aim of this article is to elaborate on the embodied, the methodological and the pedagogical dimensions of ‘mundane friction’ in meaning-making activities, and its pedagogical implications.

"The interdisciplinary theoretical framework outlined above urges scholars interested in how and why people engage in digital media to move beyond culturalist, representational and disembodied approaches into the experiential, non-representational, emplaced and sensory realm of everyday life. As suggested throughout this article, the “mundane frictions” caused by the handling of digital media in the everyday media practices plays a crucial part in highlighting the tacit and embodied aspects of learning through media. Theoretically, “mundane frictions,” and how the senses are united through motion and imaginations in relation to these frictions, suggests that digital visuality is inherently embodied and can hardly be conceptualised exclusively as visuality distinctive from other senses according to the Western construct of five sensorial categories." (Author, in "Pedagogical Implications and Conclusions")