Recent critiques contend that “Far too much current writing on photography—even in pieces about social media and photography—fixate on professional photographers,” so this piece seeks to buck that trend by focusing on ordinary smartphone owners and how they use their mobile devices to capture or create, stylize, and represent their worlds. More specifically, this study examines the “life cycle” of images from capture or creation on the device to potential editing and sharing on social media. It does so through a multimethod, qualitative approach that blends an examination of the users’ camera rolls and images they post to social media platforms with in-depth interviews to contexualize and explain their practices. The results indicate that the ordinary individuals in this sample created vastly more images than they shared and that they used their mobile devices chiefly to preserve memories, document new or unusual experiences, preserve inspiration, provide accountability or evidence, and to create visual media as a stand-in for verbal communication. Of the images they did share, ones with common reference points were most likely to be distributed, followed by ones showing new, rare or unusual experiences, ones that were unified or consistent with other images previously posted, and images that flattered the uploader.

最近的批评认为，“目前关于摄影的太多文章（甚至涉及社交媒体和摄影的文章都集中在专业摄影师身上）”，因此本文试图通过关注普通的智能手机用户以及他们如何使用他们的移动设备来逆转这种趋势。捕捉或创建，风格化并代表他们的世界。更具体地说，本研究研究了图像的“生命周期”，从设备上的捕获或创建到社交媒体上潜在的编辑和共享。它通过一种多方法，定性的方法来做到这一点，该方法将对用户的相机胶卷和他们发布到社交媒体平台上的图像的检查与深入的采访相结合，以概括和解释他们的做法。结果表明，该样本中的普通人创建的图像远远超过了他们共享的图像，并且他们主要使用移动设备来保存记忆，记录新的或不寻常的经历，保留灵感，提供责任或证据，以及将视觉媒体创建为口头交流的代表。在他们共享的图像中，最有可能分发具有共同参考点的图像，其次是显示新的，罕见的或不寻常的体验的图像，这些图像与先前发布的其他图像统一或一致，并且使上传者赞誉。