"dual fascinations with gadgetry and self-memorialization" sounds like blogging to me.
From Roll Over - analysis of snapshot photography, photos of everyday life not initially produced as art
Afterimage, Sept, 2001 by Joel Smith
"A throwaway, single-use camera is to the old take-everywhere family camera as a drive-through lane is to the neatly set dining room table: not so much an updated model as an abject admission that even the least of the old domestic procedures now asks too steep an investment of time and care. Digital cameras, still more fatally, surrender the memory-making process to conscious editorial control before an image even gets to the hard drive; together, the preview screen and the "Trash" button insure that the pictorial era of the headless grandma is truly at its end. (Snapshot-style slapstick is becoming the exclusive province of the handheld family video camera, which now supplies a n entire genre of television comedy.) On the "image-delivery" end, laptops and PalmPilots invite users to download the virtual faces of family and friends for occasional visual reference amid email and stock quotes-the final stage in miniaturization of the pre-computer office desk environment. Emailed picture files are our era's true ephemera, unlikely ever to graduate into physical form for the accidental benefit of later generations; even those that are printed will lack the archival hardiness of 70-year-old drugstore prints.
In the matter of photography's long-contested status as a fine art medium in its own right, the snapshot poses more complex issues. With its preloaded roll-film and its fixed shutter speed and focal length, the first we-do-the-rest Kodak camera of 1888 was, as its inventor readily emphasized, less a technological advance than a master stroke of marketing. George Eastman's keys to success--mass produce, sell cheap, ease down standards, distribute internationally, advertise and sell to the broadest conceivable market and, most crucially, manufacture need on a mass scale--converted photography from a specialized tradesman's science into the very prototype of twentieth-century consumer capitalism. Not incidentally, Kodak and its thousand successors succeeded by fueling what proved to be a growing middle class's dual fascinations with gadgetry and self-memorialization. The point-and-shoot camera came early into the hands of artistic photographers, whether through daily domestic circumstance, as an emblem of the demotic enemy, as the means to a distinctive new formal idiom free for the taking or even, as in Stieglitz's famous case, for all three reasons at once
Throughout the twentieth century, the snapshot served malleably as the foil, inspiration or offstage line coach for photographic artists as diverse as Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander and Nan Goldin. The "snapshot aesthetic;' a virtual house style at art photography's break-out moment in the 1970s, boasted a broad aesthetic range that included Henri Cartier-Bresson's poetic humanism, Bill Dane's existential slapstick, Ken Josephson's shrugging conceptualism and instances of what might be called the ephemeral sublime. As a dialect of art photography, the snapshot's appeal derived in some cases and to some degree from its populist associations, but had more to do with the high creative dividends that the 35-millimeter camera repaid the slightest--least "artful"--of gestures. Tilt a hand, and the world tilted with you; turn your head in another direction and you might stumble upon a new world of subject matter.."
The more things change the more they stay the same.