Photosharing syndrome

Inspired by a talk with Jon Froda on using ‘sleep­ing’ the­o­ries as a pos­si­ble way to inject dif­fer­ent think­ing into what is believed to be com­mon knowl­edge and the­ory prac­tice when work­ing with social media, I’m sug­gest­ing tak­ing a look at what could be called ‘pho­to­shar­ing syndrome’.

It’s a way of describ­ing the rela­tion of power between a pho­tog­ra­pher and the per­son depicted.

From Wikipedia on the Stock­holm syn­drome:

[…] the ten­dency might well be the result of employ­ing the strat­egy evolved by new­born babies to form an emo­tional attach­ment to the near­est pow­er­ful adult in order to max­i­mize the prob­a­bil­ity that this adult will enable — at the very least — the sur­vival of the child, if not also prove to be a good parental figure

Or in other words, you form a Stock­holm syndrome-like rela­tion­ship with the per­son who just posted your pic­ture on the web. You think it’s hor­ri­ble, that you look insane and that it actu­ally is a bit unfair. On the other hand, you instinc­tively rec­og­nize the fear of not know­ing what this per­son will do next. You might as well bond with the pho­tog­ra­pher or things could get even worse…