Instagramming life: banal imaging and the poetics of the everyday

Abstract

Imaging the everyday through mobile digital technologies is a common phenomenon in today’s digital world. While we embrace and readily accept the human need to image the banal and the trivial in our everyday lives in today’s contemporary society and digital culture, our incestuous and inextricable bind with the visual needs more introspection and examination. This article examines the aestheticisation of everyday life and image capture through the notion of banal imaging where the corporeal body and mobile technologies record the everyday through the visual. The saturation of images on digital media platforms and the non-stop need to commodify everyday life through images, both still and moving, constructs the moving body, embedded with mobile technologies, as a site of multiple articulation where consumption and production of images can be seamless. The technologically embedded body is equally a site of storage and retrieval, both through human memory and mnemonic devices. From the perspective of the everyday, banal imaging transforms the perfunctory into the performative, inviting new forms of gaze, aestheticisation, engagement, communication, connection and immortalisation of life through the visual.