Daisuke Okabe has just published Emergent Social Practices, Situations and Relations
through Everyday Camera Phone Use, her report on the research she conducted with Mizuko Ito. The continuous sharing of image-streams with social networks seems to be developing as a hybrid of technological artifact and mediated discourse — friends self-surveill and share what they are seeing as they move through the world, through their day.

For example, a college student sent this picture of sweet bean buns to her friends. To her circle, seeing a picture of something their friend just cooked, photographed, and sent from her camera to theirs has social utility.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of camera phone usage in
Tokyo, based on a diary study of usage patterns. First, I briefly describe the current state of camera phone adoption in Japan, and introduce our methodology and conceptual framework for this study. The body of the paper describes emergent practices of camera phone use in Japan, providing concrete examples from the ethnographic material.

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Users are still working out the social protocols for appropriate visual sharing, but seem to take pleasure in the adding visual information to the stream of friendly and intimate exchange of opinions, and news. Camera phones enable an expanded field for chroniclingand displaying self and viewpoint to others in a new kind of everyday visual storytelling. Camera phones makes ubiquitous visual access to others possible. In other words, the gaze of others is always present as a potentiality, leading to a heightened sense of visual awareness and a growing centrality of images in the ongoing social exchanges of everyday life.