But first, let me take a selfie..
Social media is constantly capturing and displaying the story that is our lives. Our profiles have become mini museums. This has given rise to a selfie culture, which contrary to popular belief, isn’t entirely narcissistic. It has provided an increased public visibility and subsequently, helped raise awareness for important social issues. People can also geotag the location of their photo, to showcase the event, place or venue it was taken. Making the images searchable, creating an avenue for images and people to be more discoverable. Snapchat creator Evan Spiegel, states that selfie media marks the conversion between self-expression and communication on digital media (Herrman 2014). Selfies are a relatively recent phenomenon, with the term first appearing in the dictionary in 2013 (Gonsalves 2016). Since then they have been blamed for ruining relationships, photography and our culture.
(Wright Angle Marketing 2017) But are they really that bad? Senft and Baym (2015, p.1589) contend that a selfie simply “signifies a sense of human agency”. They explain that selfies are a photographic gesture of intimacy and immediacy that can be displayed, distributed, tracked and even monetised (Senft & Baym 2015, p.1589). With the rise of locative social media, people young and old are creating new forms of attachments and entangling our online and offline environments (Hjorth & Pink 2014, p.40). Geotags can be attached to digital content to show the physical location of where something has been taken or posted. While this can sometimes have monetary benefits for people with popular social media presences or can result in freebies from businesses, there are many risks involved. Geolocation data reveals intimate details about a person’s life, whereabouts and activities (Citron 2014). It can makes us vulnerable to abuse, stalking and theft – among other things - if used carelessly. However, most people innocently use these networked publics to find friends, socialise and follow trends (Boyd 2007). Regardless of these risks and benefits, geographically placed social and visual communications has become central to the way people and images are digitally emplaced (Hjorth & Pink 2014, p. 43). The Power of the Selfie.. The real power of this publicly visibility is for those who have been previously silenced. In India, sexual assault survivors, used Snapchat filters to tell their stories via video selfies without fear of being recognised; giving them back some of the power that was stolen from them (Joshi 2016).
(Joshi 2016) Another example of selfies - sans vanity - was in 2014 when the phenomenon was used to raise awareness for the greater good. The #nomakeupselfie campaign encouraged woman to remove their makeup, take a selfie, post them online and donate money to charity. This raised a staggering £8 million for Cancer Research UK (Wright Angle Marketing 2017). The selfie culture jams a bunch of human urges together: the desire to be noticed, the need to exert control over our self-presentation, along with our yearning to celebrate, witness and reframe our very existence (Gonsalves 2016). Selfies no longer just stand for the person they depict, but rather what is represented in them: the trace made by the photographer who has produced them (Hjork & Pink 2014, p.46). We humans are fundamentally fluid and ever changing, so why shouldn’t we celebrate who we are here and now? References Hjorth, L & Pink, S 2014, ‘New Visualities and the digital wayfarer: Reconceptualising camera phone photography and locative media’, Mobile Media & Communications, vol.2, no.1, pp.40-57.
