Culture, aesthetics and affect in ubiquitous media: the prosaic image

1. Spectral monumentality and the face of time : virtuality, distortions of scale and asynchrony in post-colonial Hong Kong -- 2. The surrogate image and blog life : mobility in the everyday blogosphere -- 3. Sounding the image : between visuality and orality -- 4. Particulate vision and the evasion of capture -- 5. IPhone girl : assembly, assemblages and affect in the life of an image.

This book argues that ubiquitous media and user-created content establish a new perception of the world that can be called 'particulate vision', involving a different relation to reality that better represents the atomization of contemporary experience especially apparent in social media. Drawing on extensive original research including detailed ethnographic investigation of camera phone practices in Hong Kong, as well as visual analysis identifying the patterns, regularities and genres of such work, it shows how new distributed forms of creativity and subjectivity now work to shif