Everyone knows what a selfie is, right? It’s a picture someone takes of themselves, often to share on social media. But is that all?
Media scholars and art critics contend that selfies are a new visual genre and a new genre of personal communication. This genre’s formal characteristics include particular framing and composition (the closeness of the face and the ubiquitous presence of the “selfie-arm”); its functional characteristics highlight that selfies are a mode of conversation and everyday self-expression; and its cultural characteristics reflect the fact that it is essentially folklore, created by the people, for the people.
But selfies also have multiple meaning and uses. These vary with the social situations, and depend on the context of intent, personality, device, platform, accessibility and audiences. In some cases, selfies may be - like they are often accused - a form of superficial self-admiration or cynical self-advertising. But they may also be a way to create and maintain relationships, build communities, mount protests, understand or accept oneself.
They are, however, always a form of visual (photographic, to be more exact) and networked (which means they are born and stored on internet connected devices, thus potentially sharable via communication networks) self-representation. What does that mean? Let’s break it up.
Self-representation …
… is a personal, but culturally informed, process of using signs to express ourselves both as unique and as members of groups. And anything from our accent and vocabulary, to the clothes we wear, to obviously the selfies we take and share, can function as that sign.
Visual self-representation
… Art historians have pointed out that visual self-representation (i.e., via painting or photography) usually includes an emotionally telling depiction of the person’s body and/or face.
This is a historical presumption – visual self-representation (mostly in the form of self-portraits) became prominent when self-scrutiny and personal salvation became important in religious life. This led to a cultural belief that a person’s face is a meaningful indicator of who they are. Visual self-representation has long been linked to personal identity.
What is interesting about self-representation on the internet, though, is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a depiction of a body or a face of the person representing themselves. Studies on memes, gifs, emojis and snapshot photos shared on social media have shown that any of these can function as visual self-representation. That gif of Jessica Jones rolling her eyes? If I use it to respond to an insulting comment then it does, very pointedly, represent my reaction, and thus, in that moment, me. This means that for something to count as visual-self representation, the depicted thing has to be clearly articulated as, and interpreted as, standing in for the person, because they strongly identify with it, at that moment. This articulation and interpretation is often accomplished through something called “viewing guides”. In the case of images on the internet we use hashtags, captions and comments as viewing guides.
Another interesting take away from the history of visual self-representation, is that it has commonly been used to elevate the person’s social standing (for example painters who painted themselves in the company of the royal family) and advertise their skills (painted self-portraits the great accuracy and recognizability of which was intended to bring the painter more customers), but also for self-reflection and self-therapy. It has always had multiple social, cultural and personal functions. If that has been true to previous forms of visual self-representation, then why can’t it be true for selfies?
Photographic self-representation …
… Did you know, that when modern photo technology was developed (usually linked to a daguerreotype camera that Louis Daguerre introduced to the French Academy of Science in 1839), photographs were considered direct representations of reality, and denied the status of art? Even after it became widely accepted that photos can be altered and carry multiple meanings, we are still inclined to interpret them as documents of something that is inarguably there. This history of a special relationship to truth and truthfulness importantly impacts how we interpret selfies and what we expect them to do
Technological changes of the past decades have vastly increased the number of photos, particularly everyday snapshots. It also means that photos have gained communicative and interactive meanings in addition to their historical functions as building blocks of memory.
Networked self-representation …
… What is networked self-representation? Well, it is anything that we do online that represents ourselves, so a static website in the late 1990s was networked self-representation, a Tweet is one, so is a dating profile.
From the research into how people share photos on the internet, we know that people read a lot into images. People’s images are uses as social cues – hints that either validate or disprove our opinions about them and what they claim about themselves in other formats (mostly in text, for example in a profile).
That same research has also taught us that each photo can have multiple social functions which we can (to an extent) control – like when we delete an ‘unpopular’ image or make a loved one our profile picture.
So you see, selfies are, do and mean all kinds of interesting things. One could write a book about it. Oh, wait … I did!
