more so by photographs than the mere exchange of letters.» [28] We add: and this is satisfied more by placing images into the WWW than by sending letters. Flickr.com, photoblogs and a variety of other photo-sharing Web sites directly confirm Bourdieu’s theory that photographs only gain meaning through the social participation they bring about. Lomography.com, too, is deeply involved in the stereotypes of private photography, even if the photographs exhibit a certain stylistic difference with regard to focus and detail: What one sees are more or less blurred and poorly lighted snapshots of urban environments, friends, couples, lots of nature, and above all—as a guarantee for a certain formal capacity for abstraction—lots of water. On the whole, the images create a collective vacation atmosphere, a view of the world oriented towards the nice things in life. Here, the snapshot serves to overcome the banality of everyday life and turn it into «the idea of a successful day.» [29] A conciliatory, friendly atmosphere prevails on the Web site in which one is invited to share—«shoot, upload, share.» [30] However, it is precisely this staccato-like chain of invitations, whose characteristic linguistic style already transports immediacy, in which a medial difference to classic private photography is marked

that enables regarding the accumulation of photographs as something other than mere redundancies.

Sybille Krämer’s observations on interaction in the Internet lead us to suspect that the issue is more than just looking at individual images and keeping them as mementos; the issue here is participating in a game. [31] Thus the immediacy summoned by the photographic images is not located within the context of a heightening conveyance of everyday worlds about which one wants to inform other users, but more within the context of a game situation meant to «relieve one of the strain of the everyday world.» [32] What Krämer makes out here is a characteristic of the electronic network that conflicts with direct communication, because in contrast to the widespread myth of «direct communication» disseminated in Internet literature, one is not communicating with other users, but with texts or digitalized images, which as indicated by the humorous user names is bound to the «repeal of personality and authorship.» [33] What emerges is an intermediality or even an ‹intericonicity› in which it is not the meaning or the significance of an