Changing Visual and Social Worlds: An Introduction to the Thematic Issue on "Digital Images and Visual Artifacts in Everyday Life"

The continual advancement of visual media technologies and their everyday accessibility has led to a wide array of possibilities for presenting oneself, others and the world, for imagining the improbable, the production of evidence, ideographic expression, as well as of self-deception and deception of others. That images are socially exchanged, in that they give rise to, reinforce, or destabilize social relationships, and that they are subject to processes of conventionalization, instrumentalization, and economization, is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, images and the diversity of visual artifacts remain a complex and only partially theorized subject within social theory and are still insufficiently integrated into existing theoretical frameworks. The authors of this special issue address this desideratum. Their contributions provide insights into the particularities of contemporary image and social worlds, which they explore through appropriate methodological approaches. Furthermore, they shed light on the social-theoretical and methodological research questions that emerge from a deeper engagement with such visual and social constellations.