<p>"A new cell phone photography class at a suburban Philadelphia university focuses on both the quality of the images and the ethical responsibilities that come with taking and publishing them.</p>
<p>Cell phone cameras and associated scandals have become so ubiquitous that it’s important for students to realize “the full gravity of what’s at their fingertips and the power they can have,” Immaculata University communications professor Sean Flannery said.</p>
<p>Flannery teaches the class with Hunter Martin, a professional photographer who works with students on the mechanics of making the images, including composition, lighting and editing. Flannery deals with such issues as voyeurism, ethics, citizen journalism and the difference between public and private spaces…"</p>
<p>I am taking a class about visual culture at the moment and we have bee having some pretty intense philosophical debates about facebook that have been fairly valuable to my education, so I personally wouldn’t be quick to dismiss this class.</p>
<p>I think it’s an ok class. Students gotta have some non core classes to keep them happy and excited. Sure u can choose to take it or not but if you wanna talk about cell phones for a couple hours a week and it keeps you interested I say go for it.</p>
<p>I couldn’t simplify it into a sentence because we had a two hour discussion with a lot of different points brought up, but some of the main ideas of the facebook debates were about how we put so much of ourselves onto the internet and how what we choose to put up is a construction of how we see ourselves and/or want to be seen by others, and the validity of those constructions. We also talked about how, for example, a lot of people make an effort to take perfect happy pictures of everybody at an event even if it was a disaster and they act like they have to preserve that moment even though the picture isn’t really truthful-- when photography was first being developed it was believed that it was a window to the soul and that pictures were an inherent truth about a persons essence, but in the modern study of photography we see that it’s precisely the opposite and that it’s all a social construction-- and furthermore when you put in so much effort to take perfect happy pictures of everywhere you go, you’re removing yourself from actually having the true experience because you are too busy taking photos and concentrating on making sure that they’ll look like everybody had a good time for when they get posted on facebook instead of truly being present in what was really going on-- ever spend so much time taking pictures at an event that you forget to stop and enjoy yourself? Same basic principle. </p>
<p>I think the cell phone photo issue is an interesting one because it makes photography even more accessible for these kinds of things to occur, and it’s interesting to think about what it means socially and culturally to decide in a split second to whip out your phone, snap a shot, and show it to the world all in one fell swoop. It really changes the face of communication. Think about, for example, War of the Worlds-- the book, not the movie. A big theme in that story was communication because the only way they had to communicate were newspapers, which got harder and harder to distribute as more and more towns got destroyed, and word of mouth-- for a large part of the story people didnt really understand what was going on, for DAYS, because they didnt have the kind of instant long-distance communication that we have today, entire villages were being destroyed nearby and people had no idea their families had died because the communication of the time didn’t allow for them to know what was going on outside their own village very quickly or accurately. Technological advancements in communication, like camera phones, really change culture. </p>
<p>If you’re not into that kind of thing it might sound dumb, and I probably didn’t explain it so great since I was trying to compress a lot into a couple of sentences, but it was a really interesting discussion. The social evolutions of photography are kind of nifty.</p>
<p>Cell phone photography… I would say it’s a stupid class, but I’d like to avoid being the kind of person always condemning new popular technology entering the educational system. It’s happened with a lot of things, why not cell phones? Clearly just an elective, anyway.</p>