Photography, Social Networking Sites, and Modern Rituals

Photography currently forms an integral part of communication on social networking sites and in messengers. Another topic that has become relevant is daily individual rituals, which are also associated with new media. Virtual communication, where messages can be addressed to a whole group of recipients at once, involves the establishment of new rituals or the transformation of the existing ones. In such communication, digital photo images are actively applied. In the present article, the author analyzes some modern practices of publishing photos on social networking sites and reveals their ritual functions. The study shows that photography on social networking sites is connected with the process of transformation of old rituals. The author highlights that photography on the Internet performs several basic ritual functions, namely the functions of socialization and integration, as well as the reproducing and psychotherapeutic functions. It has been found that such an important feature of a ritual as its stable and repeatable form, as applied to photography, is expressed in the development of canons of photographic images created and published for a particular purpose. Thus, the existing genres of visual arts (e.g. still life, Madonna and Child, etc.) are gaining newfound relevance, and so are the well-developed photography forms of mass media and popular science (e.g. personals, architectural and ethnographic photography, etc.). The result of the study is the conclusion that creation and publication of images on social networking sites contribute to the ritualization and aestheticization of everyday life and allow an average user to declare their existence in response to excessive images of media personalities in the visual space.