Digital Photos as Conversational Anchors

During shared viewing printed photos frequently serve as anchors for conversations. Conversational interactions are less common when images are not printed. People do not commonly gather around a monitor to look at digital images, although the passing around of cell phones and digital cameras displaying images is increasingly common. The congeniality of paper has many advantages for synchronous sharing. Although both printed and digital images can be shared asynchronously, the effort required frequently precludes such sharing. JussPress (www.jusspress.com) is a system designed to minimize the effort involved in sharing digital photos. It enables instant publishing and organization. Automatic temporal organization of the photos is shown to have many advantages. Additionally, by making comments easy to make, read, and check, web-based photos also became anchors for conversations. We discuss the coherence of these conversations, instances of them spanning multiple photos, their organizational impact, and why conversations were infrequent for some users.