Photography in social media: transformation and transcoding

As social life has expanded considerably into the virtual space, social media have become an important part and one of the topos of an individual’s life. The work analyzes transformation of photographic image published within the specific topos of social media. In this circumstance, photography, initially an ‘image’, ‘mimesis’, turns into a statement, a presentation and representation of an individual in the virtual society within the social media. Photography becomes not only the means of credible representation of a real individual behind the virtual persona but a manifestation of one’s interests, ideas, reflection and self-reflection. An individual’s hybrid existence, simultaneously in the material world and the virtual one, modifies the processes of self-identification accordingly. Not only the real person constructs their virtual image, but this image, in its turn, inevitably and considerably influences to the change of the individual’s identity in the real world.