In Digital Images, Photo-Sharing and Everyday Aesthetics in the Journal of Visual Culture (August 2008, Volume 7, No. 2) Susan Murray argues:

argues that the social use of digital photography, as represented on Flickr, signals a shift in the engagement with the everyday image, as it has become less about the special or rarefied moments of domestic living and more about an immediate, rather fleeting, display and collection of one’s discovery and framing of the small and mundane. In this way, photography is no longer just the embalmer of time that André Bazin once spoke of, but rather a more alive, immediate, and often transitory practice/form. In addition, the everyday image becomes something that even the amateur can create and comment on with relative authority and ease, which works to break down the traditional bifurcation of amateur versus professional categories in image-making.

Photo-sharing sites such as Flick represent a shift in production, representation, and sociality. A user’s Flickr page works as autobiography or diary by layering an ever changing or growing stream of photos on their page thereby moving the focus away from the single image. The pages that are the most subscribed to are those at the center of a community of photographers, such as those by Heather Powazek Champ. The content of some of the most popular pages are:

dedicated to the exploration of the urban eye and its relation to decay, alienation, kitsch, and its ability to locate beauty in the mundane. Some have claimed that it is indeed a new category of photography, called ‘ephemera’. It is, perhaps, the confluence of digital image technology along with socia network software that has brought about this new aesthetic....It is now possible to affordably and reasonably incorporate the taking of photos into your everyday life rather than saving film for ‘special’ moments.

Instead of evoking loss, preservation, and death, users and viewers are encouraged to establish a connection with the image that is simultaneously fleeting and a building block of a biographical or social narrative. While these sites build a collection, they also privilege the immediacy of the image and acknowledge the inability of photography to hold onto time even as it provides avenues for nostalgia and memory.