The COVID-19 pandemic has reorganized existing methods of exchange, turning comparatively marginal technologies into the new normal. Multipoint videoconferencing in particular has become a favored means for web-based forms of remote communication and collaboration without physical copresence. Taking the recent mainstreaming of videoconferencing as its point of departure, this anthology examines the complex mediality of this new form of social interaction. Connecting theoretical reflection with material case studies, the contributors question practices, politics and aesthetics of videoconferencing and the specific meanings it acquires in different historical, cultural and social contexts.

Capturing personal data in exchange for free services is now ubiquitous in networked media and recently led to diagnoses of surveillance and platform capitalism. In social media discourse, dataveillance and data mining have been criticized as new forms of digital work and capitalist exploitation for some time. From social photos, selfies and image communities on the internet to connected viewing and streaming, and video conferencing during the Corona pandemic - the digital image is not only predominantly networked but also accessed through platforms and structured by their economic imperatives, data acquisition techniques and algorithmic processing. In this issue, the contributors show how participation and commodification are closely linked in the production, circulation, consumption and operativity of images and visual communication, raising the question of the role networked images play for and within the proliferating surveillance capitalism.

In contemporary society, digital images have become increasingly mobile. They are networked, shared on social media, and circulated across small and portable screens. Accordingly, the discourses of spreadability and circulation have come to supersede the focus on production, indexicality, and manipulability, which had dominated early conceptions of digital photography and film. However, the mobility of images is neither technologically nor conceptually limited to the realm of the digital. The edited volume re-examines the historical, aesthetical, and theoretical relevance of image mobility. The contributors provide a materialist account of images on the move - ranging from wired photography to postcards to streaming media.