Artifacts of Urban Digitization: The Digital Commoditization of the Urban Environment in Rome

When one thinks of an “artifact,” what constitutes its meaning? An artifact is an object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest, and further, it is something observed that would not be present naturally, but occurs as a result of the preparative, investigative procedure. When I think of an artifact, I think of something hidden underground for years, encased in dirt or tucked away waiting to be unearthed, which we view as an indicator of culture. It might be a pot, a piece of silver jewelry, or a photograph – something immortalized as a result of its cultural significance. Today, this definition of “artifact” could also include an Instagram post – something entirely digital. Someone existed and partook in modern media culture for a single moment, in a single space – urban or otherwise – and has chosen to immortalize it. My photographic and videographic documentary series, Artifacts of Urban Digitization, shows how our urban environments have been captured and shared through evolving photo-taking processes. It explores how these practices, both historical and contemporary, contribute to memory-making and social engagement within city life. As our methods of documentation have evolved, our own social codes (unwritten rules and expectations guiding behavior in public spaces) have been altered to prioritize photography, as displayed by my direct observations undertaken in Rome in Fall 2022 and Spring 2024.

This essay covers five locations within the city center of Rome that are known for the photos and videos commonly presented on social media. I observed two bridges in Trastevere (Ponte Sisto and Ponte Garibaldi), the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, and the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola on the Gianicolo Hill. At each location, I stayed between thirty minutes and one-and-a-half hours, but at certain densely populated areas such as the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain, I stayed for even longer, up to two-and-a-half hours. I chose each location because it was deemed touristic and “Instagrammable,” in accordance with its abundant appearance in social media geotags, hashtags, and public user profiles. At each location, I used my camera as a mediating tool to view and document the occurrences and actions of participants in photography. I watched them use their cellphones for selfies, to take multiple photographs of one another, as well to take snaps of the location in ways aligned with the aesthetic principles of visual social media, particularly Instagram.

In today’s heavily technological and hyper-visual social media epoch, the human use of urban space has been digitally commoditized. Since the development and increase in use of smartphone applications that facilitate sharing and communication, especially Instagram, visual social media content has become a primary means of displaying and participating in the city. Users of social media have thus come to view and use the city landscape as a digital, visual commodity. As photographs in general were once the major way to display urban environments – or any environments for that matter – Instagram has only made this simpler. Social media applications allow images demonstrating human participation in everyday life to be freely accessible and easily reproducible, all the while allowing the person who posts an image to share their experience selectively, offering an illusion of spatial control.

Are people drawn to urban locations because of their aesthetic or social value? Or because modern media emphasize a digital culture which implies that if we don’t share, we weren’t there? Social media representation seems to mean participation, and everyone is constantly checking to see if you are a participant in urban life. Throughout my ethnographic research, I focused on how the urban environment is represented in visual social media, and how human actions within the city are altered by the city’s presence in social media, specifically through Instagram. As Lev Manovich argues, “Instagram is the perfect medium of the ‘aesthetic society.’ In such a society, production and presentation of beautiful images, experiences, styles, and user interaction designs is central for its economic and social functioning.”¹Lev Manovich, abstract for “Designing and Living Instagram Photography: Themes, Feeds, Sequences, Branding, Faces, Bodies,” (2016), available at https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/designing-and-living-instagram-photography. Instagram’s primary purpose is to show something pleasing to the eye, to manifest a viewer’s ideal image of a place. The photo viewer wants to go to the location shown, and this creates a common feel for viewers that facilitates communication between like-minded individuals. As Manovich explains, this aesthetic society develops an ambience in accordance with a specific mindset of values for things that are visually pleasurable, demonstrated by people’s use of these urban spaces. This mindset is conveyed in social media “through lifestyles that favor appearance and form… and this is the ‘message’ of Instagramism.”²Manovich, “Designing and Living Instagram Photography.” This project pinpoints particular moments of “Instagramism” at popular locations: social media users selecting common poses, general camera positions, and objects or urban infrastructure used as “props” to understand how digital representation as a commodity alters participants’ actions in city life.

Firstly, to place the act of urban photography in a feminist perspective, following Leslie Kern’s concept of self-regulation in the city,³Leslie Kern, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (London: Verso, 2020). I ask: how do people, and women in particular, choose locations, positions, or times of day to show themselves participating in city life through images? In general, taking a selfie or posing for a photo enhances the constant gaze already placed on people within urban environments, especially the male gaze as placed upon women. Examples can be taken from my personal observations, where at certain times of day in the busy area surrounding Piazza Venezia, I have more than once viewed photoshoots occurring, often featuring a woman in an extravagant dress, posing in the street with her photographer on hand. In these instances, there were several external observers close by, mostly male, watching the woman. This position, tucked away by the side of the Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II, is generally a less prominent place for people to take portraits of themselves, as they usually pose directly in front of the monument. This explains why so much of the urban gaze was placed on this solo woman in particular. I have even seen some of these onlookers taking their own photos of the woman being photographed, as if she were an exhibition in a museum. In contrast, at a place like Piazza della Rotonda, which houses the Pantheon, where everyone is taking pictures, nobody places an objectifying gaze on the abundant photo takers. This leads to many women self-regulating in terms of choosing locations for photographs. At plenty of locations I observed, people had a tendency to take photos in environments where others are doing the same – and in these spaces, people may even ask strangers to take a photo for them, as witnessed at the Trevi Fountain, for example.

This selection of locations is an example of what Leslie Kern describes as a sort of self-policing. She writes, “restrictions – self-imposed and otherwise – on women in public have far reaching implications and connections to other forms of gendered oppression and inequality.”⁴Kern, 113. This restriction of where women take photographs, and how their actions have changed in the photo-taking act as a result of the male gaze, has led to women going in groups or with a boyfriend, and primarily taking photos during the day in public places. Such restrictions apply even to clothing: at a few different sites, I observed women wearing a jacket over a preferred outfit on the walk to the photo location, to take it off only for the photo-taking process. For example, I observed a young girl wearing a jacket over a dress at the Trevi Fountain, an older woman wearing boots and then taking heels out of her bag and changing at the Colosseum, and a woman wearing her sweater over a tank top at the Colosseum.

Furthermore, I also observed sequences of social codes in urban settings. For example, when a photo is being taken, people have a tendency not to walk in front of the camera, passing behind the photographer and out of the frame, or even waiting beside the frame until the camera has been lowered and the photo taken. In one case, a man walked into the frame, and then proceeded to apologize frantically to the family in the photo, stepping backwards as he did so. This is a strange social code to follow, as taking a photo by no means confers any special privilege or ownership over the space to the subject or the photographer. However, once the photo has been cropped, edited, and posted, it gives viewers of this urban backdrop or location an illusion of the user’s possession of that field of view. This act of posting the image is a way for the subject and the Instagram user to temporarily claim the space inside the field of view.

The way we choose to represent urban space in social media reinstates our control to “see all” in small-scale images of large-scale places. Erkki Huhtamo names this process the Gulliverization of media, through which trade cards, newspaper ads and other smaller media images bring unreachable things — a product, a desire, or even a location — closer to the observer, making them tangible.⁵Erkki Huhtamo, “Messages on the Wall: an Archaeology of Public Media Displays,” in Urban Screens Reader, ed. Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), 20. The square of the Instagram post, as well as the cell-phone viewfinder frame first used to create the post, gather a vast distance up, making it “tangible and ‘personal’ at the fingertips.”⁶Huhtamo, 20. He continues: “such paraphernalia functioned as placebos for the products the subject did not (yet) possess. Everything was mediated by ‘magic’ transformations.”⁷Huhtamo, 20. The ability of Instagram posts to mediate between opposites of near and far, of tangible and unreachable, through things like framing or zoom features, offer the photo-creator, as well as the one viewing the Instagram post, an illusion of control and experience of a total gaze over whatever aspect of the city is being represented.

From my observations, especially at the lookout point at the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola by Gianicolo Hill, photographers often stood on the bench to make themselves even higher above the city.

By doing this, the photographer can frame the entire city in a section the size of a trading card, giving them a sort of ultimate control, like that of this image (below).

This sense of control is then shared with whoever clicks on the Instagram post. The external observer, who was never really there, can view the entire urban environment in the same way as the photographer. The Gulliverization of ourselves via selectively shared social media images of cityscape means, as Susan Sontag wrote in an earlier era of photography, “putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge– and therefore, power.”⁸Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 174. Through social media, a user can manipulate the way others see the urban environment. Because of the potential for a totalizing panorama or a down-to-the-last-detail close-up view, one may feel more comfortable existing in cities. The reinstatement of control on an otherwise uncontrollable environment is enhanced by displaying this “digital city.”

Such a sense of control over the urban environment is amplified by the process of selection. I observed how photographers pose and arrange their bodies and surrounding objects in efforts to capture specific moments in their daily lives for Instagram in the most aesthetically pleasing way possible. Instagram feeds may vary, but for the most part they project a very specific, selected image of urban environments.⁹Manovich, “Designing and Living Instagram Photography.” This is one way in which the power and knowledge we feel from seeing a photo is only an illusion, as it shows us the city environment in a controlled, altered, perfected, and aestheticized state. As Susan Sontag wrote long before the advent of social media, “photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.”¹⁰Sontag, 177. Writing about Instagram, Irene Bronsvoort and Justus Uitermark explain that “when a place in the street or the street itself is pictured, this is mostly done in an aesthetic or artistic way, with the aim of highlighting the beauty or originality of the place.”¹¹Irene Bronsvoort and Justus L. Uitermark, “Seeing the Street through Instagram: Digital Platforms and the Amplification of Gentrification,” Urban Studies 59, no. 14 (2022). This often involves not just careful framing and posing, but also the application of filters that can dramatically alter colors, lighting, and the overall mood of the image to enhance its visual appeal. These filters can even remove people present in the background altogether, further creating an illusion of power. Consider Fontana di Trevi, which often looks pristine and perfect on social  media. Yet if we were to zoom out beyond the Instagram frame, the reality is chaos.

As well as editing and filtering images of the urban environment in Instagram, photographers deploy tactics that defy the strategically designed city in order to take the best shot possible.¹²Michel DeCerteau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). People within photos, or even those taking them, use tactically placed urban objects as natural photo props, and facilitate the photographer’s movement to find appealing angles. Structures such as benches and lamp posts may have been developed by city planners for strategic reasons, but I have observed many tactical uses of these items by photographers and subjects. Firstly, an aesthetically pleasing background that adheres to the photographic framing rule of thirds, such as an intersection, is a common location for subjects to pose for photographs. The subject is centered in the frame and aligned with the vanishing point of the urban backdrop.

Another tactic I observed was that photographers and subjects frequently lean or sit on walls, stand on benches or fences, or place a foot or arm on a railing. When several people are taking photos at a particular location, others will join them, even if they must ask a stranger to be their photographer. If people are leaning on fences or sitting on walls and someone is photographing them, other people will see how appealing it looks and pose in the same manner. The way an urban environment is shown on social media adds to the huge map that city inhabitants or visitors often follow. If we see something we like in an image, we go there, and often we take a photo to post that furthers the drive to this place for aesthetic value. As shown in Natacha de Mahieu’s digital exhibit Theatre of Authenticity – the inspiration for my own gallery – “posts on social media appear to answer to certain aesthetic and social codes which people are using as if they were actors, creating their own online performance in landscapes as visual commodities.”¹³Natacha de Mahieu, “Theatre of Authenticity” (2021), https://www.natachademahieu.com/portfolio/G0000YBICEpl8j10 This happens everywhere, especially in cities, as they are places that are so densely inhabited and widely visited, and therefore heavily represented.

Social media users and photographers construct and depict our urban environment as a visual medium – as something to be shared and made iconic to enhance our social media presence. Digital platforms play a significant role in shaping our perceptions of and interactions with city spaces, especially with regard to behaviors and social codes. People tactically repurpose urban objects and spaces to stage and frame the perfect shot, and the act of photography in public spaces raises questions about self-regulation, the regulation of other people’s actions, and the regulation of the space itself. Instagram creates opportunities to control how one views space. It allows us to enhance, minimize, or project a totalizing view upon a landscape. The impulse to capture and share visually appealing representations of city life has led to the commodification of urban landscapes and the careful curation of idealized, aestheticized versions of reality, all in pursuit of the “Instagrammable” moment and driven by a desire for self-representation, validation, and a sense of participation in urban life. However, while these platforms offer opportunities for self-expression and connection, they also have the potential to reinforce and perpetuate distorted representations of reality. As social media platforms continue to play a significant role in our day-to-day life, it is crucial to reconsider how they influence our relationship with urban spaces. Rather than constantly seeking to capture, shape, control, and perfect the city through digital technology, we should strive to observe and be shaped by it. This shift in perspective encourages us to appreciate the ordinary aspects of city life, not just the extraordinary or “authentic.” By doing so, we can move towards more nuanced portrayals of urban environments that acknowledge the complexities, imperfections, and everyday realities of city spaces, challenging the homogenized aesthetics often perpetuated on social media platforms.

Kaitlyn Adèle Barrett-Gullion

Kaitlyn Adèle Barrett-Gullion holds a degree in Humanistic Studies with minors in Communications and International Affairs from John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. She now works on developing communication strategies to promote sustainable agricultural practices globally. Her interests lie in exploring human behavior across different cultures and historical contexts, with a particular focus on the interconnections between technology and community.