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254 Patricia G. Lange and Mizuko Itoaround photo albums to share photos with their friends and family; aMySpace profile or a camera phone will do the trick. Consider the followingtwo observations by Dan Perkel (The Social Dynamics of MediaProduction) in an after-school computer center:Many of the kids had started to arrive early every day and would use the computersand hang out with each other. While some kids were playing games or doing otherthings, Shantel and Tiffany (two apparently African-American female teenagersroughly fifteen to sixteen years old from a low-income district in San Francisco)were sitting at two computers, separated by a third one between them that no onewas using. They were both on MySpace. I heard Shantel talking out loud aboutlooking at pictures of her baby nephew on MySpace. I am fairly sure she was showingthese pictures to Tiffany. Then, she pulled out her phone and called her sister andstarted talking about the pictures.This scene Perkel describes is an example of the role that photos archivedon sites such as MySpace play in the everyday lives of youth. Shantel canpull up her photos from any Internet-connected computer to share casuallywith her friends, much as researchers have documented that youth dowith camera phones (Okabe and Ito 2006). The fact that photos about one’slife are readily available in social contexts means that visual media becomemore deeply embedded in the everyday communication of young people.In this next example from Perkel’s study (MySpace Profile Production), weget a glimpse into how young people take and modify photos with thissocial sharing in mind.I sat down next to Janice (a teenager roughly fourteen to fifteen years old whoappeared to be African-American), who was on one of the computers at [the center].I saw her on Yahoo! Mail dragging photos from her email to the desktop of one ofthe [center’s] computers. She told me that she had been to [the] Stonestown mallin San Francisco with her cousin and had taken pictures. One of them was over hermock kissing a mirror and later I would see this picture as her profile picture onMySpace. Another picture had some special effects. She told me that she had donethis at the Apple Store. Then, she proceeded to upload them to her MySpace account,though I noticed that it took her several attempts. The story here is that she tookthe photographs in one location, used Yahoo! as a way to move her pictures aroundfrom different locations, took advantage of the Apple Store to do some creativeediting to at least one of the pictures, and then finally used [the center] as a placeto upload them to her MySpace profile.The case that Perkel describes is particularly notable in how Janice mobilizesmultiple infrastructures to create photos to share on MySpace: taking