Information in social practice: A practice approach to understanding information activities in personal photography

Abstract

This theoretical paper explores the implications of adopting a practice approach in information science, proposing ‘information in social practice’ as an umbrella term in preference to ‘information behaviour’ or ‘information practice’. The paper explores one influential definition of practice and how four forms of personal photography would be understood within it. It shows that social practices often involve information activities such as seeking or managing information, although they are not the end of the practice. Information activities differ markedly between apparently similar practices; indeed conceptions of what information is are shaped by particular practices. This justifies examining information at the practice level. The focus in the practice approach on social convention and identity, materiality and embodiment, routine and change may also change how we look at information.

Keywords

amateur family photography food blogging information in social practice moblogging personal photography practice theory serious leisure the practice approach

1. Introduction

At the beginning of this century Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and von Savigny suggested that there had been a turn to practice theories in many disciplines [1]. A decade later, we continue to see evidence of this turn, for example, in organization studies in the work of Orlikowski [2, 3] and in media studies in the work by Postill [4], while Schatzki’s own writing has developed the approach influentially at a philosophical level [5]. Not itself a single theory, the common strengths of research adopting the practice approach lie in the focus on social expectations and social identity, on materiality and embodiment and on routine and change [1, 5 –8]. There has also been some work inspired by the practice approach in information science. In particular, Lloyd has shown that what constitutes information literacy (IL) is shaped by a particular context [9]. Embodied skills are very important to the use of information within the skilled performance of the practitioner ambulance medic, whereas critical understanding of texts, so important to IL in the educational context, is far less important. Lloyd convincingly points to the neglect of embodied knowledge in information literacy literature with its focus on a ‘cognitive approach to individual behaviour’ [9, 10]. Other authors such as Haider, McKenzie and Veinot have also drawn on practice theories in their work [11 –13]. Yet the practice approach is not very common in study of information. This paper expands on arguments set out by the author in a previous issue of this journal [14] about further bringing the practice approach into information science (IS). That paper offered a critical evaluation of the practice approach. This paper focuses much more on explaining how the character of a particular practice shapes information activities within it and how the particular interests of practice theory might refocus our attention in the study of information.

The connotations of the word ‘behaviour’ and the central focus on seeking out information to satisfy needs make ‘information behaviour’ problematic as an umbrella term for this field [15]. Some authors now prefer the term ‘information practice’ [16], yet this seems to privilege those few social practices that are primarily informational. One of the insights of work under the banner of ‘Information in everyday life’ is that information is mostly gathered and used as a set of sub-processes contributing in complex ways to a wider social practice, rather than being the centre of social actors’ attention [16]. It seems, therefore, more apt to think in terms of ‘information in social practice’. This brings to the fore that most if not all social practices include information activities, but that the nature of these is shaped by the particular character of the practice. Information activities include more than just seeking out information. Thus many social practices involve information seeking and sharing, information management, information creation and information literacy, but what that information is, where it is sought, how it is shared, how it is managed and evaluated, whether it is even seen as ‘information’ or called that varies dependent on the flavour of the practice concerned.

The aim of this theoretical paper, therefore, is to both elaborate and evaluate the notion of ‘information in social practice’ through examination of a number of concrete examples. The examples chosen are all personal photographic practices as described in the existing literature. The four examples are: family photography (principally as described in the work of Rose [17]), amateur camera club photography [18, 19], photographic practices within moblogging (blogging using a mobile phone) as described by Peterson [20], and the author’s own previous work on food blogging [21]. On the surface these are rather similar activities. None have information as their main purpose such that we might wish to call them ‘information practices’. It is widely understood in the photographic literature that recording and actively constructing family life and values through snapshot photography is a rather different practice from the pursuit of photography as a hobby [22]. As such it has a different set of purposes, activities, technologies, participants, knowledge base and aesthetic criteria. Moblogging could be seen as an extension of family photography, using everyday events and objects to reflect on personal non-familiar relationships, whereas food blogging is akin to amateur photography in that it is itself part of a serious leisure pursuit, gourmet cooking, yet they are different practices. As an illustration of this difference one could reflect that the carefully staged photos of food common in food blogging were never an accepted subject in the rather narrow repertoire of camera club amateurs [19]. Food bloggers recognized that taking photos of food was perceived by others as weird [21]. While mobloggers might indeed snap a photo of some food, the purpose is to discuss some off-beat aspect of daily life, rather than to glamorize food. Family photography might include a photo of family members at a meal, but the focus is the people present; the food symbolizes their connection, but is not the focus of attention.

The examples will be used to illustrate the pervasiveness in an information society of information activities within non-work activities, as scholars in the information in everyday life [23] and serious leisure fields [24 –26] have begun to show. For these authors information is important to personally significant and pleasurable aspects of our lives, not just in fixing problems and work contexts. In particular Hartel’s work on gourmet cooking, especially her paper about a gourmet cooking episode, has been an inspiration for this paper, for the way it shows how information activities occur throughout a cooking episode, without ever being the point of it [24 –26]. Lee and Trace similarly identify a ‘knowledge interest’ in collecting rubber ducks, but seeking information is a secondary aspect of the hobby [27]. Nevertheless, there are problems with the serious leisure perspective [28] that is often adopted by such authors. The extent to which serious leisure (like gourmet cooking) is a form of consumption that serves to promote commercial interests is not recognized. The serious leisure perspective privileges non-work pursuits that fit a certain model, one ironically derived from a particular form of work, professional work, as understood in developed countries, in the present day. So it is a historical construct; this does not seem to be recognized sufficiently by Stebbins [28]. Feminist criticisms of the professions in general would suggest to us that Stebbins’s account privileges forms of leisure that males have more resources to pursue. Burgess’s work on vernacular creativity for cultural citizenship demonstrates the theoretical significance of limited mundane acts of creativity [29]. Savolainen’s stress on everyday and habitual activities, as opposed to highly significant life projects in serious leisure, is also useful in pointing to the importance of taking seriously mundane activities [16]. Therefore the examples used here include both amateur practice of serious leisure, and more mundane and evanescent activities.

The focus on this paper is on the detailed consideration of how the information activities within these forms of personal photography are shaped by the flavour of the particular practice, as well as on how the preoccupations of the practice approach, such as materiality, focus our attention in different ways from the cognitive, rationalistic emphasis of the information behaviour literature. General criticisms of the practice approach are discussed to bring out the limitations of what is ultimately one particular perspective or theoretical lens, which naturally has limits on its usefulness. The paper is organized, therefore, as follows. In the first sections Schatzki’s terminology [5] is used to build up a description of the four forms of personal photography. The next section considers the different ways in which information activities, such as seeking, managing and creating information, are woven throughout these practices, if rarely the locus of social actors’ attention. The next section examines how the practice approach preoccupations with aspects such as materiality and routine might refocus our attention in the study of information. The paper concludes by reviewing some of the issues with adopting the practice approach.

2. A definition of social practice

There is no likelihood or even advantage for a single account of practice theory to emerge. It is a broad church of theories, but the specificity of Schatzki’s definition makes it an attractive starting point for examining the character of the approach [5]. For Schatzki

A practice is a temporally evolving, open-ended set of doings and sayings linked by practical understandings, rules, teleo-affective structure and general understandings. [5, p. 87]

Schatzki defines the basic unit of activity as ‘bodily doings and sayings’ [5, p. 72]. Thus practice is about physical actions but recognizes the performative nature of speech too. It is an important aspect of the theory that the meaning of action is defined within a practice; a similar action can mean something quite different in another practice. Family photography consists of ‘doings’ such as taking photos of family members on certain types of significant occasion and arranging prints in albums. Sayings could be things people say (or do not say) on these occasions, such as looking through an album. Amateur photography consists of many of the same activities, but some different ones, for example, travelling to take photos of a landscape, managing one’s collection, mounting photos and also the type of thing one says about other club members’ photos. Moblogging consists of snapping things in the street or around one’s home and quickly uploading them, and commenting on the photos of others. Food blogging consists of activities such as searching for a recipe, cooking and eating [24]. The photographic element is taking a photo of some lovely food when one has made it, then uploading the photo with accompanying text. The meaning of somewhat similar activities, such as taking photos, is quite different in each case. A practice approach demands that we look closely at concrete things people do and say within a set of inter-related activities and the material resources and arrangements that go with them.

Of the other elements of Schatzki’s definition, practical understandings are defined as ‘knowing how to X, knowing how to identify Xings, and knowing how to prompt as well as respond to Xings’ [5, p. 77]. They are skills combined with an understanding of how to use them appropriately. For example, amateur photography involves such things as knowing how to operate more advanced features of a camera, for example, understanding focal lengths, light metering, etc. and also knowing what to look for in a photo (within the conventions of the amateur community) and using appropriate language to describe why a photo works within a certain aesthetic code. Rules are explicit statements of how to carry on the practice that people participating take account of, both explicit directives and instructions generally, such as recipes. A camera manual contains instructions about the functions of the camera. It might also give guidelines on how to compose a nice photo. The camera club rules would contain further injunctions on how to do things; the principles of what constitutes a good photo are different. The rules about how to behave in moblogging are unwritten (except in Petersen’s thesis), but much discussed offline by participants [20, p. 101]. General understandings are general beliefs that find expression across many practices in how the activities are carried out. This element is not always in Schatzki’s definitions of practice. An example of a general understanding might be widespread understandings of the meaning of an amateur leisure pursuit in a prosperous Western society.

Teleo-affective structures are ‘a range of normativized and hierarchically ordered ends, projects, and tasks … allied with normativized emotions and even moods’ [5, p. 80]. The phrase is perhaps clumsy, but it points to the way that a practice consists not just of sets of types of activities of varying degrees of complexity, but also of purposes and affective aspects. In the practice approach so much of what we might think of as driven by individual thought, emotion or need is shaped by the social conventions of a practice, although it can be renegotiated. The focus is on doing things, and feelings as well as intentions.

Rose [17] argues that the end of family photography is ‘doing togetherness’ through how photos are used, such as how they are exchanged and how the collection is talked about. These ends are achieved by projects such as pasting photos in an album or collecting a portrait of every family member for a number of generations. A task might be taking a photo of one of the children on their birthday or requesting a recent picture of a cousin. For Rose, seeking to create a collection of photos of the family is expected to elicit happy feelings. Moblogging ‘is about documenting your everyday life and sharing your pictures online so that everyday life can be the material for sociability’ [20, p. 66]. Petersen describes various ‘projects’ that people pursue such as taking a photo of one particular view of a street in the city every day. A photo might be low-quality, poorly composed by the standards of a photo club, for example, yet it is good in this context if it stimulates responses and interest from others in the community. The feeling related to these activities is very much around sense of friendship and empathy with others and what Petersen [20, p. 96] calls ‘intense distanced intimacy’. In this sense it seems to be a reworking of the relational focus of family photography.

Amateur photography deploys many of the same tasks, but the ends are more likely to be about learning, achievement or being a member of a club. A project might be trying to improve one’s black and white landscape photos. At least in the past, camera clubs had quite consensual views of what a good photo was to be – beautiful in a particular type of way, for example, with a clear focus of interest and good tonal range [19]. The range of personal and social rewards of serious leisure defined by Stebbins indicates the normativized individual and social ends that are common to many such pastimes [28].

The end of food blogging is commonly the celebration of good food and turning its consumption into an ‘extraordinary’ food experience [30]. Hartel pictures the way that a hobby gourmet career is made up of discrete episodes (making a dish) that in turn make up a passing interest in a particular subject (such as Italian cuisine) [26]. These correspond to Schatzki’s tasks and projects. Photography’s role is largely to record and share moments of pleasure. Emotions associated with food blogging would be joy in eating food and a more reflective pleasure in going over past experiences using photos and records.

Each of the chains of activities assembled into food blogging itself has a complex composition. Thus Hartel describes the cycle of steps in a ‘gourmet cooking episode’, in terms of exploring, planning, provisioning, prepping, assembling, cooking, serving, eating and evaluating [24]. Similarly Chalfren provides a framework for thinking about the different logical elements in traditional photographic practice: planning, shooting, editing, exhibiting [22]. Kirk et al. in their investigations of digital photo work have seen the elaboration of organization and sharing activities, arising from use of digital cameras and networking of computers [31]. So each activity chain is complex. In food blogging the chaining is even more complex, since all these elements are potentially being interwoven. Further the writing element of blogging would involve a chain of activities: such as making notes for a blog entry, writing it, proofing, publishing it online and then responding to comments. The complexity of this assemblage of activities creates a potential for new patterns of activities to emerge. Participants’ different skills and resources may lead them to practice it differently.

3. Information activities in the four photographic practices

Having constructed a practice-based account of the four forms of personal photography, the paper now turns to consider aspects of information within these practices.

3.1. Information seeking

There is little literature specifically on amateur photographers’ ‘information needs’, but the discovery of information activities in serious leisure literature [25] would suggest that they could be significant. We can infer something from the literature of artists’ information needs [32 –34]. Here there is a fair degree of consensus about what are typical information needs: for inspiration, specific visual elements, knowledge of techniques, marketing/career guidance and knowledge of trends in art. It has also been identified that there are other recurrent features of information seeking behaviour: needs are rather idiosyncratic; browsing is the preferred mode of access; electronic resources are increasingly used [32]. Hemmig throws out a few specific comments about photographers compared with other artists, for example, his data indicates that they seem to particularly like to learn by trial and error rather than from courses [33, p. 693]. Naturally we cannot simply read off camera club photographic practices from this other literature. Serious leisure photographers, although according to Stebbins they have systematic relationships to professionals, by definition do not make a living from the activity [22]. Thus the need among artists for marketing information is likely to be less strong for amateurs. Equally it could be objected that camera club amateurs precisely would not define themselves as artists and use a completely different way of talking about their practice, so to assume they share similar information needs is problematic [18]. These are reasonable points that could be addressed by collecting empirical data about camera club photographers’ information seeking, but for the purposes of this paper it seems reasonable to hypothesize that amateur photographers do actively seek information to support the hobby in general. It seems reasonable to guess that information sharing among amateurs would revolve around needs such as for inspiration or learning about technique. Flickr, for example, seems to provide a forum for such activities. Food blogging has a similar feel of a hobby or amateur practice; it also involves seeking inspiration in other food bloggers’ photos and searching for more knowledge about technique.

In contrast, family photography probably generates only a few ‘information needs’, for example, occasionally needing to find information to buy a new camera or to find ways to store photos. These are not central to the practice, and can be easily subsumed in an understanding of general information needs related to consumption. One can imagine within family photography people seeking information from others about dates of events pictured in a photo or who an unidentified person in a picture is. Seeking information within the collection is an important activity. Petersen’s account of moblogging, similarly, does not mention much information seeking in the kinds of ways that are a preoccupation of the ‘information behaviour’ literature. Sometimes people try to find out offline about a person who has started posting comments online.

Thus the existence of information seeking activities varies radically between somewhat similar practices, shaped by the character of the practice. This points to the need to examine human life including information activities at the level of practices in order to understand it.

3.2. Personal Information Management

Spurgin comments that ‘photowork is a specialist form of PIM’ (personal information management) [35, p. 61]. Digital photography generates more files to manage. We take more photos because there is no developing cost, it is easy to copy photo files, and copying the same image occurs naturally when one photoshops a photo. File management is not an entirely new need, but digital collections are likely to be large. Spurgin’s analysis of postings on a photo forum discussing the need to organize their big collections of digital photos, for example, reveals interest in organizing material for retrieval, such as designing workflows, setting up robust file structures, choosing metadata schemes, designing selective but robust backup structures and security. The identity of those using the forum is a little hazy, and could include all sorts of amateurs, semi-professionals and professionals. Nevertheless, her paper is enough to convince us that the serious amateur is likely to invest considerable time and effort in such matters. The key issue may be whether they need to retrieve photos from the past for reuse; if their hobby is such that they do, they are bound to be concerned with such PIM. However, we can hypothesize that, for some amateurs, it may be that, as she argues [35], some of the technical interest that has always lain in photography [18] has partly transferred from camera technology to computer technologies.

Rose is not concerned much with digital photography. However, her interviewees spent a lot of time ordering albums, for example, putting images in chronological order, making sure all significant moments and people are represented [17]. They thought they should record information about the picture on the photo, but did not actually do so very often, but they did invest a lot of time and feeling into managing the collection of images. We might hesitate to call this PIM, perhaps because the scale of the photo collection makes it not very interesting from that perspective. The impression generated in the human–computer interaction literature about digital family photography is a little different. Here there is a consensus that family photographers fail generally to invest sufficient time in information management [36]. Proliferation of photos for the reasons already given, combined with taking images with multiple devices and storing images in multiple places, the reliance on time as a principle of organizing collections, but inaccuracy of clocks on some photographic devices, and the general inattention to PIM, lead to a breakdown in information organization. This leads to valued older photos being impossible to retrieve [36]. Sluis and Rubinstein accuse this type of literature as being too influenced by the agenda of the mobile phone companies in focussing on problems and technical solutions to them [37]. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this paper it does seem that family photography does have a personal information management aspect, although one rather different from that encountered in amateur photography.

In a further contrast, moblogging is inherently more ephemeral, the photos are of low quality and the practice is spontaneous, so there is probably less concern to archive material. In addition, firstly, the photos are already archived on the web site(s) where they are shared (although there are issues of control about leaving the site). Secondly, any picture’s meaning is inherently bound up with the web of comments and links around it, so that simply saving the image alone is not a solution to preserving it. Whereas the amateur is probably primarily concerned with retrieval within their personal collection, which is locally stored, the moblogger is interested in tagging to support retrieval for themselves, but also for others. Most of the information science literature about Flickr, for example, has been about tagging and how well it performs relative to professional approaches to image classification [38]. In contrast, Moblogging is not systematic about such things and mobloggers do not want to give too much information about the photo as it restricts interpretation of the image and discussion. They play a game where other people tag photos with tags that relate to the photos in only a tenuous way. This would have the effect of expanding the comprehensiveness of tags, but lowering their precision. Thus how tagging is done is shaped by the character of the practice and cannot be appropriately evaluated by the general criteria of information retrieval theory.

Another personal information management aspect particularly relevant to moblogging would be access management, that is, controlling privacy settings to control who can see which images when lots of your images are uploaded. The security concerns for the other three forms of photography would be somewhat different. Thus the PIM aspects of moblogging exist, but are rather different from those both of family and amateur photographers.

Food blogging photography also creates concerns around access management. There is a concern to channel audiences from photo sharing sites such as Flickr through to the blog, but also to keep some imagery and text private to family and friends. Managing audiences or ‘traffic’, in other words access management, is a central interest. Food bloggers were often concerned with ownership of their content, including their photos, so there are strong interests in intellectual property rights issues, shared with other hobbyists using Flickr.

The examples further illustrate how in different practices approaches to personal information management differ, shaped by the specific needs of the particular practice.

3.3. Information creation

One of the main purposes of family photography is to ‘document’ our lives [22]. It is used to record events such as birthdays and holidays and particularly to capture what people looked like and who was present on special occasions. Therefore, in a sense to take a family photo is to create an information source. Our concern to get everyone present in shot could be seen as an attempt to ensure complete information is captured. Although we have good reason not to believe that the camera never lies in the case of images in the media, we probably do treat family photos as reliable sources of information, in the sense that we do not believe that they have been manipulated. Yet we would be aware of other kinds of limits on their reliability. Our injunction to everyone to smile could be seen as generating a photo that is a misrepresentation of how people actually felt. We understand the convention and take that into account in how we read the photo. Yet much about such photos is staged, and it is difficult to see them as true in a simple sense. People will disagree about the interpretation of photos, for example, because they remember the occasions pictured differently. Thus the nature of family photos as information is complex.

Lambert describes how within the practice of genealogy people develop strong imaginative beliefs about ancestors through photos of people they have in fact never met [39]. Although this would be scorned by science as a way of knowing, it does illustrate one way that family photos might be treated as information, within a particular practice. One would probably not call family photography an information practice, nevertheless part of it is understanding the photo as a source of information in particular types of ways.

Similarly some mobile phone photography is certainly informational: Kindberg et al. identified that a significant proportion of camphone photos are ‘functional’, serving to record information (such as a bus timetable) or act as a reminder for self or others [40]. Moblogging itself documents lives, although in a different way from family photography. It is the mundane lives of the authors that are captured, focussing on things they notice around them. This is done primarily in order to generate conversation with friends and potential friends. It is a detailed information source on small things in the person’s life, and gives out unintended information about the person and also more significant aspects of their life and character.

many of them use Flickr because they like to get more information about their friends’ everyday life and communicate more with them. [20, p. 91]

Moblogging, unlike some internet phenomena, is not about playing with multiple identities; equally overt self promotion is deprecated within the practice. Because moblogging is primarily conducted with real world friends and premised on the truth of what is being shown, the information can be seen as reliable in a particular type of way. Yet we would be aware of limits on the comprehensiveness of the information being shared with us in this practice. Information about the city is also generated in moblogging, and there are some who have tried to build services out of aggregating such content. The problem, Petersen suggests, is that this misunderstands the nature of the commentary being offered. It is information relative to a particular community; structuring it within standard tourist categories loses much of its value [20].

Food photography is also partly informational: it is intended to show what a recipe looks like when made. It is also intended to be inspirational: expressing how delicious it is and inciting others to make it. Unlike family photography or moblogging, it is less concerned with relationships – people are relatively rarely photographed.

In contrast to the other three examples, in amateur photography the end product is not documentation but aesthetic. An amateur photographer would be disappointed if one evaluated his black and white photo of a landscape as good because it gave useful information about land use. Later taken into another practice such a use might be made of it, but that is not the objective within amateur photography itself. The photo of the camera club amateur is intended to be aesthetically pleasing, within a particular code. It is not intended to convey information. Ironically, therefore, despite the information seeking in pursuit of the hobby and the PIM needs it generates, amateur photography is not itself informational.

Thus somewhat similar photos within each practice (a family photo, a camera club photographer’s portrait, a moblogger’s self-portrait of their face reflected in a shop window and a picture of oneself eating at a restaurant) would be judged differently from an information perspective. The conventions of information arise within particular practices. How the photo is used as information (whether it is understood using that term or its nature as information) is highly coloured by the specific nature of the practice. One example we have explored is not informational at all; the other three are, though in different ways.

3.4. Information literacy

It follows from what has been argued above that, as Lloyd has argued competence in use of information, information literacy, is defined within a specific practice or field [9]. In Lloyd’s example, IL on a university course to train as an ambulance medic is not very similar to that needed to actually practice as an ambulance medic. At university IL is about finding texts and evaluating them. Practising as a medic involves bodily knowledge, intuitions about the emergency situation one arrives into and embodied skills in interpreting a patient’s symptoms. New knowledge is more likely to be derived from one’s social network than reading texts. From the description of information activities in the four personal photographic practices discussed in the paper, it will be clear that the information-related skills needed are also different from academic IL. Amateur photographers may have a need to search for, locate and evaluate information, for example, in relation to skill development. When, where and how to share such information is also relevant. It would seem that we could extend the information-related literacies required to include information management skills; the amateur needs complex knowledge about file naming, metadata, backup strategies and intellectual property rights issues. Knowing where to find and how to evaluate such knowledge may be part of this aspect of the amateur and could be improved by IL training.

As we have seen, moblogging seems also to involve some knowledge of retrieval techniques, although it may not be seen in those terms. Mobloggers need to know about tagging and how to manage access to content in a complex web environment. However, neither family photography nor moblogging seem from the evidence available to generate complex information needs and so literacies in the area of defining searches and seeking information. Interpreting the information in family photos or moblog images should be seen as a learned information skill, however different it is from the obvious case of evaluating books or journal articles in an academic context.

Food blogging often seems to involve active information research, so retrieving information from a personal library of books is likely to be supplemented through food fairs and word of mouth as well as other blogs and web sites [25]. There is a specific focus on one type of information: recipes. How to operate in these different spheres is a quite particular set of skills. Thus what constitutes information literacy is defined within specific practices.

4. How practice theory preoccupations inform the study of information activities

Table 1 summarizes the points made so far in the paper. To illustrate the particular ways in which the practice approach would shape the study of information, the next part of the paper looks at the preoccupations of practice theory and how they might direct our attention to relatively neglected aspects of information activities.

Table 1.

Information in the social practices of personal photography

	Family photography	Amateur photography	Moblogging	Photography in food blogging
Teleo-affective structure	‘Doing togetherness’	Achieving personal and social ends through a ‘career’ in the pastime	Documenting everyday life to enhance social connections	Celebrating the love of good food, partly through photos
Information seeking	Limited to searching within the photo collection itself	For inspiration For learning about technique	Not present to a large degree	For inspiration For learning about technique
Information management	Increasingly necessary but not often practised	Managing a large collection of photos: designing workflows, version control, backing up material	Tagging photos with a particular purpose	Managing content and traffic
Information creation	As documentation of lives but not necessarily interpreted using empirical epistemology	Not a purpose	Information about the photographer’s identity	As evidence of what a recipe looks like when made; to record a special food event; to inspire others
Information literacy	Understanding how to interpret a family photo	Understanding how to manage a large collection of photos and workflows; to find information for inspiration/improved technique; intellectual property rights	Understanding how to tag images and how to interpret moblogged images	Understanding how to effectively search for new recipes in personal and public collections; creating new recipes; managing audiences

4.1. The social and social identity

For Schatzki practices are social because doings and sayings are shaped by social conventions and understandings and also because they are the context in which we encounter others, including but not only those with whom we directly interact [5, p. 87]. Within the practice approach a practice is a pre-given cultural resource, however there is considerable play for these resources to be used in different ways and to be reshaped and renegotiated. People practise differently [41]; they also define the boundaries of the practice and therefore who is part of its community differently.

Family photography is based on a set of fairly widely understood conventions about what it is appropriate to photograph and how images are to be interpreted, whereas amateur photography or moblogging is understood by a narrower group, and actively negotiated within that community. As an aspect of these conventions, the nature of informational content or lack of content is defined. As we have seen, family photos are read in one way, moblog photos in another. Amateur photos would not be seen as information at all. Yet we can imagine that the conventions allow room for manoeuvre and contestation.

Among writers in the practice approach, Wenger [42] in particular has made a strong link between practice and social identity; it is far less developed in Schatzki. Our identities are negotiated in relation to practices. This is complex, however, because we participate in many practices and our degree or trajectory of participation in these varies over time. Furthermore, McCarthy and Wright use Hodges’s [43] work to stress the importance to experience of ‘non-participation, multiple identificatory positions, lags in participation and conflictual moments of identification’ [44, p. 191] and also dis-identification with a community of practice.

Personal photography and social identity are closely woven together: we seek to define ourselves through our relation to other family members in choices of photo and how they are organized in albums. Hobby and amateur activity is largely a personal identity project: the arc of participation in the hobby, the leisure career, is an exploration of the self. Some food bloggers embraced the activity as an obsession, subverting the negative overtones of the common discourse about the Internet that it is addictive [21]. Here obsession is a measure of authenticity of the activity and a discourse of complete identification with the activity. Any sort of blogging, be it moblogging or food blogging, could be seen to a large degree as preoccupied with attempting to define the self, for the self and others. Again, this shapes how we might think about information.

In moblogging information is given out about one’s life through images of daily activity. Some of this is self conscious artifice, to some degree it is a noticing and recording of things that indirectly reflect on oneself. The act of noticing increases our awareness of self. The responses from others confirm or question how we see ourselves. Certainly, the information to a large extent is about the self. Food bloggers’ explicit project is to present and further develop something they see as significant about themselves: their love of good food. They are concerned to fit into a wider community of other bloggers (and also professional food journalists) and are preoccupied with blog comments as responses to their claim to a level of status within foodie culture. They tend to seek a niche in a particular type of foodie specialism (e.g. making cup cakes), which both proves their foodie credentials and also differentiates them from others. Mutual interest and support are balanced by competition for attention and often a desire for recognition as an expert in a unique specialism. Competition is effectively through specialization in what information is created and shared through the blog. This produces a distinctive pattern of a series of rather discrete specialist information sources. The practice approach focuses our attention on the way that information is created and used within processes related to the construction of social identity.

Shared practices create common ground between people, communities of practice, that are less visible to outsiders. London food bloggers knew each other or had at least heard of each other [21]. They were each others’ most significant audience. One interviewee was amused that outsiders did not grasp that they knew each other and were in contact. Intermittently there were informal meet ups organized by one or other of the food bloggers. One commented:

I find that food bloggers all kind of get along. Because we only talk about food, while eating food.

So the networks within which information is intensively shared is shaped by the social network the practice creates.

4.2. Embodiment and materiality

An early definition by Schatzki describes practices as: ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understandings’ [1, p. 2]. The turn to practice is precisely away from cognitive processes, including rationally guided decision-making, and towards a concern with physical activities, skills and material habits and the use of objects.

Practices shape how we use our bodies and in so doing have a role in how we see our own bodies. Taking photos is an embodied activity, for example, it involves physical actions, such as holding the breath while pressing the shutter release or picking up a photo to look at it. Even an unskilled photographer has a way of holding the camera; an amateur camera club member sets up her tripod in a particular way. Photographing and uploading in moblogging is an embodied experience: a ‘reflex’ [20, p. 160]. Foodblogging is inevitably a bodily activity, for eating food is central to the practice.

The practice approach reminds us that information is essentially absorbed through the body, the senses, decentring more cerebral aspects. Photography is visual information, not textual information. The practice approach departs from a focus on facts encoded as texts [10]. The nature of how we interpret meaning in images as opposed to texts is an area of complex debate, but it is usually argued that images are interpreted differently, for example, they are more open to multiple interpretations [45]. Although a food blogger reads off information from a food photo such as how long something has been cooked for, the more important responses are bodily, from whether they experience an immediate desire to eat what they see represented. Of course, photos play an important role in how we see our own bodies.

Physical objects are also an important aspect of the practice approach. The material activity of amateur photography involves such things as camera lenses, dark room chemicals and cardboard mounts. Cameras and various equipment, including computers, are needed to take and share digital photos, they shape what we do, but we make choices and have flexibility in how we use them.

The way that information is used is tied up in physical objects. Camera functions and needs shape what information can be captured in a photo, for example, cameras are dependent to some degree on the amount of light available and most fundamentally they capture visual information only. The availability of devices that capture images (increasingly not just cameras, but phones and computers) shapes what information can be captured. Thus Petersen makes it clear that it is the particular affordances of the camphone that shape moblogging to be quite different from other digital photography: the low quality images, having the capture device always present and its discrete size allowing unplanned photography, and its connectivity that permits sharing [20, pp. 58, 66]. The poor quality (one could say lack of information) enhances interaction by requiring further explanation.

4.3. Practices’ spatio-temporal qualities

In an earlier definition, Schatzki describes practice as a ‘temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings’ [46, p. 89]. Thus an important aspect of practice is that it is a process, a set of activities that has its own time rhythms and typical activity spaces where it is carried out. Thus moblogging has a particular rhythm of quickly taking photos on the spur of the moment while traversing city spaces and then uploading them immediately. A major connection between the bloggers in Petersen’s study is their common experiences of their city of Copenhagen. Commenting occurs at certain times, when one is prevaricating or hungover [20, p. 161]. Thus some of the temporal rhythms of daily life, such as when one is commuting, and the need to move on swiftly, are likely to shape the quality of the practice: taking photos rapidly. It also explains why it is an annoyance when Flickr does not correctly upload photos chronologically because the temporal unfolding of the practice is significant [20]. Equally moblogging affects how time and space are experienced, for example, whether commuting is simply dull or enjoyable.

One interviewee for the foodblogging study the author conducted [21] described her usual way of working as being to write a little in preparation for a blog entry (in the living room), then at a later date make a recipe (in the kitchen), move to another room to take photos (for better light and backgrounds), eat the food in this same place, and later write up and edit photos with the laptop in front of the TV. Releasing blog entries had to be carefully timed, so it might be done at work. Subsequently there might be readers’ comments to respond to. Thus activities that make up the practice of food blogging are ordered in space and time. Physical factors in the layout of rooms, such as the availability of cooking tools or lighting, govern where things are done and their order, creating a degree of routine. How information is created and shared is thus shaped by physical and temporal arrangements.

In contrast, the camera club photographer might set aside a block of special time to take photos. The spaces preferred might be different, for example, the natural world or the studio. How one experiences those spaces is changed within the practice, thus a field becomes a place to try and take beautiful photos. In family photography, the home is where our personal photos are displayed in frames in the kitchen and bedroom (and perhaps online), but they would not be put in other spaces such as the garage or by the front door. Indeed, Rose shows that what counts as domestic space is effectively produced by the practices involved in using snaps: framed photos of a particular sort signal that the space is being defined as an intimate, familial one [17]. However, also time and space are constructed in a complex way by images and their use, for example, how the divide with absent family members or images of the past are negotiated.

These would direct our attention to spatial and temporal patterns in how information is created and used. Information is produced and used in particular places, for example, in food blogging information sources like recipes are found in the personal collection around the house or on the Internet, then used in the kitchen. How information is created by the food blogger is shaped by room layouts and temporal contingencies. The ability to use information could be affected by changes in these places, such as competition for space or network access not being available.

4.4. Routine and change

Much practice writing is concerned with bringing routine and unconscious actions to the fore. Swidler writes of practices as ‘routine activities (rather than consciously chosen actions) notable for their unconscious, automatic, un-thought character’ [47, p. 74]. Other practice writers, including Schatzki, dwell less on this aspect of the theory, for the practice approach also highlights the complex and changing nature of practices, that they are rarely simply repeated, but are always open to change, small and large.

Camera club photography would also have its habitual aspects, such as the routines of setting up the camera or working on mounts (these things are done differently by the family photographer). Even though it is a particular convention of photography that it tends to elevate what it captures, because the presence of the camera is part of the ritual of special occasions, such as weddings and holidays [22], nevertheless the camera is used in habitual ways. Because of its link to special occasions, food blogging photography plays a part in the desire to create extraordinary consumption experiences [30]. The shift towards photographing the mundane and everyday, associated above all with the camphone, has been noted by a number of authors [48, 49]. Petersen’s thesis is precisely about how people use common mundane experience to build social connections. In the process the everyday is made less unnoticed [20].

The way that our habits in doing things shape information seeking has been a preoccupation of the work of Savolainen [16, 23]. Habits of looking for information in particular places reduce the potential to identify new sources.

If certain aspects of photography become routine, practices are also open to change. Because a practice is a rather fluid complex of activities, material arrangements and social negotiations, it can evolve. Each blog entry is experienced as a creative bricolage of multiple elements, including objects, people and events. It feels unique, unpredictable, emergent and social. It is also experienced as of a discovering of the self, as if the self is one of the elements being assembled. External changes also reshape practices. An obvious example is the changes in technology that have constantly reshaped amateur photography, a process accelerated in the rapidly evolving functionality of digital cameras. Indeed maintaining continuity of ends and meanings itself involves effort in the face of multifarious technical changes. People’s first reaction to new technologies is often to try and work out how to do familiar things in the new system, before also experimenting with new things that can be done. ‘Habits and conventions are being redefined on the run as individuals design their own way through what is in effect a rather dense thicket of digital opportunity’ [50, p. 86]. These same changes could influence how information is created within photographic practices. We have seen how technological changes have impacted in creating new and complex information management issues for both family and amateur photographers. If a practice shapes what information is and how it is used, changes in the practice will reshape what counts as information.

5. Conclusion

The contribution of the paper is to use Schatzki’s [5] concept of practice and the practice approach in general as a framework for investigating information activities, conceived as ‘information in social practice’. To do this the core definitional aspects of practice were elaborated using four examples. The definitions supplied by Schatzki and others perform well in producing a rather rich account of the four practices, and focussing at the level of practice shows how they differ. It sees individual actions within the wider framework of a bundle of inter-related activities and conventions. It avoids just thinking about personal photography as an undifferentiated whole. The approach clarifies how similar seeming (personal photographic) practices are actually very different. A practice approach provides a complex account of a set of inter-related activities, with a particular stress on its social, material, embodied, spatio-temporal and its routine or changing nature.

The examples also illustrate that many social practices have an information aspect or contain information activities. Yet information is not the end of the practice; they are not ‘information practices’. Different practices have different patterns of information-related activities woven through them. In some information seeking might be significant; in others not. The type of information sought will be different. The same is the case for managing information. What information is contained within photos is seen as different. Whether and how a photograph is informational is dependent on the context of the practice within which it occurs. Information activities are strongly shaped by the practice. The particular preoccupations of practice theory focus attention on neglected aspects of information activities, such as how information use is a process shaped by physical arrangements and the role of the different senses in taking in information in different ways.

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