Selfie (Un)Culture(d)

“Animal filters are a selective and aesthetic form of biomimicry. Nature has an aura of authenticity and beauty and is a terrific marketing tool. We call this phenomenon biomimicmarketing: using images of nature to market a product”

“The cute versus wild paradox is illustrating the human experience of nature in our contemporary society. The use of animal filters is actually emphasizing that “I am not an animal, therefore I can pretend to be one”.

“Contrary to our first hunch, animal filters do not bring us closer to animals. Instead, they enable us to distance ourselves from the species we do not belong to. The humanized animal filters are reinforcing our anthropocentric worldview, in which humans are the center of existence and largely distanced from animals.”

-Meike Schipper. NextNatureNet

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This offers an interesting foray into the strange phenomenon of animal filters and the unusual blending of animalistic qualities with qualities of normative feminine beauty (bigger eyes, smaller chin, smooth skin, etc.). Once again a highly feminized media affordance (girls are much more likely to use this tool), what does this say about the ways in which women are expected to present themselves? 

- “I understand the complexities of documenting your existence because no one else will. And we don’t exist in a vacuum. All of the conditions that we live in and are shaped by, they don’t just go away when we live our lives. Even within selfies, I still see people choosing to post the selfies where they look thinner, more desirable, more in line with traditional beauty standards. What I see happening with beauty in oppressed communities is that we create an alternative reinforcement, claiming that it’s revolutionary — but it’s a new cage we are all supposed to live in.”

- Mia Mingus. “Why Ugliness is Vital in the Age of Social Media”, Interview conducted by ALOK, 2018. 

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- “One expert described how Instagram in particular might accelerate the “envy spiral” of social media: “If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram,” she postulated, “one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality.”

- “technology makes possible many good things; political and economic conditions guarantee, however, that it is constantly warped so that the same kinds of bad patterns repeat themselves, in new and improved forms.”

- Ben Davis. “Ways of Seeing Instagram”, 2014. 

“Instafame demonstrates that while microcelebrity is widely practiced, those successful at gaining attention often reproduce conventional status hierarchies of luxury, celebrity, and popularity that depend on the ability to emulate the visual iconography of mainstream celebrity culture. This emulation calls into question the idea that social media are an egalitarian, or even just a more accessible, way for individuals to access the currency of the attention economy.”

-Alice Marwick. “Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy”, 2015. 

“None of the so-called "selfies" in Warren's video were actually taken by the candidate herself. In other words, they weren't actually selfies. The world of politics, that's called "being out of touch.”

If Warren can't be trusted to educate herself on the most rudimentary of tech-related terminology, how can she be trusted to lead on tech issues, much less stand up to Vladimir Putin?”

- Andrew Stiles. “OUT OF TOUCH: Big Tech Antagonist Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Know What ‘Selfie’ Means”, 2019. 

I think we could call this one, damned if you do, damned if you don’t lol. Senator Elizabeth Warren is admonished for her more loosely defined use of the word “selfie” (the speaker takes offense at her use of the word to describe a self-focused photo session that was not taken by the senator personally). 

- “The critical reflex is to dismiss selfies as yet another indication of a pervasive culture of narcissism. I disagree. The narcissism critique approaches the selfie as if it were analyzing a single photograph. It views the person in that photograph as the photograph’s subject. Selfies, though, should be understood as a common form, a form that, insofar as it is inseparable from the practice of sharing selfies, has a collective subject. The subject is the many participating in the common practice, the many imitating each other. The figure in the photo is incidental.” 

- “When we upload selfies, we are always vaguely aware that someone, when it is least opportune, may take an image out of its context and use it to our disadvantage. But we make them anyway as part of a larger social practice that says a selfie isn’t really of me; it’s not about me as the subject of a photograph. It’s my imitation of others and our imitation of each other.”

(Jodie Dean. “Images without Viewers: Selfie Communism”, 2016)

“This notion takes on great significance in social media culture, when confronted with the sheer volume of self-representations by women in their teens to mid-20s. Viewed individually, they appear rather banal, commonplace, and benign. Taken en masse, it feels like a revolutionary political movement – like a radical colonization of the visual realm and an aggressive reclaiming of the female body. Even if there is no overt political intent, they are indeed contending with the manner in which capitalism is enacted upon their lives.” 

- “One twitter user noted that autoethnography was the "selfie" of academia. Along the same lines another—and my personal favorite—said that autoethnography was akin to "diddling your pet hamster." These tweets neatly sum up the principal criticism of autoethnography: self-indulgence”  

- focus on the self, according to FINE (1999), transforms "the intensive labor of field research into the armchair pleasures of 'me-search'" 

- Elaine Campbell. “Forum: Qualitative Social Research”, 2017. 

- “AirDrop is like a roving ephemeral message board that anyone in the area can contribute to”.

- “It’s not unheard of for kids to blast out nudes (of themselves or others) and porn. Some kids bully one another by distributing compromising or unflattering photos of their classmates. Because AirDrop is a feature that is automatically included on every iPhone, not a social-media app, there’s no moderation or reporting tools, nor can anyone get banned from the service for sharing graphic or sexual images like you could on Instagram, for instance.”

 - “Adults who stumble into an AirDrop ring usually feel like they’ve entered the wrong room. It can feel awkward, and grown-ups often aren’t sure whether they’re being trolled.” 

-  Taylor Lorenz.  The Atlantic, 2019 (shared via her Twitter Account, @TaylorLorenz)