#cameraconsciousness

In the era of social media, self-representation cannot go without a selfie, shared with hundreds of “friends” before being stored away in the Worldwide Web’s “save it for later” back room, to only be pulled out for your 21st and when you are looking for really important job. It generally represents how we want other people to see us.

  In this day and age, digital photographs allow us control over our photographed appearance, inviting us to tweak and reshape our public and private identities.

Urban Dictionary defines Selfie as: 'A picture taken of yourself that is planned to be uploaded to Facebook, Myspace or any other sort of social networking website. You can usually see the person's arm holding out the camera in which case you can clearly tell that this person does not have any friends to take pictures of them so they resort to Myspace to find internet friends and post pictures of themselves, taken by themselves. A selfie is usually accompanied by a kissy face or the individual looking in a direction that is not towards the camera.'

I will admit that it is human nature to want to show off your achievements. When you feel good about yourself it's easy to reach for your phone and document it all through one or more (usually more) selfies.

Visual media is revolving and changing the direction of social media. It all started with Blogs, a long form of storytelling, with the use of gifs and images.

Then moved on to platforms like Facebook and Myspace with shortened posted and walls that we express ourselves on. Then came Twitter. Twitter dramatically changed the way we communicated by cutting it down to 140 characters or less, so resulted in people posting pictures and videos instead. 

  And now with platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Vine, words are optional and are replaced by images. Communities are present in all of these platforms – just in different ways.

  When it comes to social media posts those messages with photographs included are more likely to receive active user engagement. Research shows that photo post receives 104% more comments than non-photo included social media posts.

  I personally I’m not a massive user of social media. I only really have committed to Facebook. When I first joined I posted everything – including my fandom of Twilight (how embarrassing!). However, as I got older I realised that I didn’t want pictures of me on the Internet. So now I only post things that are important (questionable) and that I would be happy with a potential employer seeing it.

In my own experiences I have found that people will post just about anything - including truly horrid photos and videos of their friends on social media. Personally I have found this apparent on my birthday. My friends find it appropriate to dig up bad photos from my formative years and share it will everyone. That is why I have taken to changing my Facebook settings. This includes needing to approve any pictures I am tagged in, which means I have some control of the amount of unforgiving images of me are out there. Unfortunately, some have slipped through the cracks - I guess that is the price I pay for growing up in this generation.