Visual Communites and the Obsession With the Selfie
Anyone that knows me, knows my aversion to having my photo taken. As such, I really struggle with the concept of the selfie. I don’t need you to see a photo of me for you to be able to communicate with me! I do appear to be in the very small minority with these views if social media is anything to go by these days. However, I digress. What is a selfie? A selfie is a self-portrait that is taken of one-self. This self-portrait has created with the purpose of posting it to social media and is taken with a digital camera or smartphone (Qiu, Lu, Yang, Qu, & Zhu 2014)
The selfie has changed the way we express ourselves on social media and has seen the introduction of more visual based social media channels. Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are all forms of visual publics. Visual publics are defined by Ito (2008) as “Publics that can be reactors, [re]makers and [re]distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception”. The introduction of Snapchat and Instagram, in particular, have seen a shift in the way that we post online. This is because they are both predominantly image and video driven social media platforms.
Online expression is an important form of communication. How we communicate always depends on the technology available to us at that particular time. Photography was, at one point, purely used for keeping memories or remembering a special moment in time. Now, with billions of people across the globe having a smart phone with an inbuilt camera in their pocket, citizens are now exploring new ways in which to express themselves online. Enter the selfie. The concept behind the selfie is all about your personal brand, and with selfies, you are branding yourself with an image. Young adults, in particular, are using these images as a way of building their online profiles.
This can pose some significant issues. One of these are the drawing comparisons between oneself and others. According to an article in The Conversation, when it comes to our online personas, we present the very best of ourselves. We achieve this by applying filters to our images to ensure that we upload content that only makes us look at our very best, as we are living in a world that places emphasis on physical beauty and there is a constant pressure to look our best. This can place immense pressure on adolescents and can cause insecurity if they feel they have come up short against the profile of another on social media. It is important to remember that this sort of competition would exist even if the selfie did not. The selfie culture was introduced into this world that places an emphasis on beauty, it was not created by selfie culture.
