The Peripheral Image

Abstract

There is a curious, and at times absurd, function to the appearance of images at the edge, the periphery, of web pages. The most defining characteristics of these images are not their literal, spatial peripherality, but rather their conceptual peripherality: their de-centered, yet economically central, role on the web. These images are de-centered insofar as they aren't the media ends for Internet users (i.e. they aren't what users are "online" for), and as such they constitute a sort of Internet detritus – thumbnails, banner ads, swipe-up-for-mores – they are image reproduction run grotesque and amok, towards seemingly inconsequential ends, negligible in form and content. Despite this, the information one might glean from their visual language is strikingly relevant in the context of affective economics (the marketing theory concerned with the relation between emotion and consumption) and the peripheral image, as we will see, signifies, and modulates in a very material sense, the exploitation of the cognitive surplus and pre-personal desires of Internet users through curious affective forms. Image as carrot on a stick, leading users into a sort of mis-en-abyme of similarly formulated images and articles that one might follow and interact with to no particular end. In considering the appearance and relevance of the peripheral image we might best understand the implications of their form as a multivalent material for the study of cultural production, affect, consumer cultures, and Internet platforms.