#selfieproj
For my project I set out to 1) discern the social functions of selfies in modern America and 2) name and analyze different types of selfies & how they emphasize different elements of self, using my personal Snapchat selfies as a case study.
I published on Atavist. The essay is designed to be read linearly, but you can also navigate the project with the toolbar in the top left corner, which will direct you to different sections for convenience’s sake.
https://emilycarrick.atavist.com/selfieproj
#selfieproj 4eva
First off, I think it was funny that we both started the same way, with Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year. Obviously we hold these guys (whom you called “pencil-wielding, society-shaping academics” and I called “wordies”) to some pretty high standards.
I loved how this project turned out. The sections transitioned to each other very naturally and it all was easy to follow and fun to read. The first phrase that struck me was “visual currency.” The value we get from these selfies, the value we give them, the value others give them – that’s all super interesting. It’s a phenomena that you immediately justify discussing. I also find it super interesting that you don’t just talk about what celebrities are saying (which is also important) but you also have found some pretty cool academic pieces discussing this cultural trend, like Rachel Syme’s “SELFIE.” Not easy to do with these quickly-changing fads, as I’ve found with emojis.
I thought having your selfies accompanying the text led to a really cool narrative experience (oh god, BACK OFF ENGLISH MAJOR BRAIN). It was humorous to see your multiple faces following the progression of the essay, but it was also another side of the narrator that made the words really accessible, fun, interesting, and easy to get into. You really made the relationship between word and image work in your favor.
What did I get from this project? I believe you are effectively subverting the idea held by so many that this “seflie generation” is only taking pictures of themselves because they’re vapid, vain, and self-centered. After reading the finished product, I really started rethinking my ideas of selfies. There are many many layers to be peeled back there. All the activism and that feminist stuff (WOO WOMEN) and the selfies by Amber Smith and Emily Knecht. So cool.
Something kind of interesting that I thought of while reading this project was how similar emojis are to selfies. Am I going crazy by the amount of emojis I’ve been experiencing lately? Possibly. But selfies are used to convey emotions at the most basic level, as emojis are. But they are so so so so much more than that, which is something society doesn’t give them credit for. They can both be used to tell stories, and we somehow have developed a way to extrapolate meaning and value from them, in a way that we have yet to fully appreciate or understand.
Hey Emily!
I really enjoyed experiencing your hybrid project. It was fun and whimsical but also smart and well written. The website form was very clean and presentable. I really like the way you have characterized the selfie, and I really agree with (what seems to me to be) your opinions on them. They are so so much more than what most people view them as, and who is anyone to judge me and my selfies????!
I perceive this project as an attempt to categorize selfie types and explain their purpose and effect, examine the opinions and attitudes surround the selfie, apply a bit of feministic lens to your study all in an attempt to call respect to the selfie as dynamic phenomenon. It made me think a lot about my selfies. Ive realized I delete my selfies pretty quickly after sending them to others… am I embarrassed someone the picture wasn’t intended for might find it? do the selfies lose their value to me once their delivered to the recipient? Do i only take selfies for other people? not sure but your stuff definitely got me thinking. I also am very impressed with your catalogue of selfies.
It also got me thinking about how selfies are an industry… how people on Instagram make money by taking selfies. Companies will pay selfie takers to wear their clothes, eat their food, drive their car or use whatever it is they are selling and document it with a photo that they share with their followers. I think the selfie has a lot of power.
The only thing I would change about this (super small petty thing that is probably just my personal preference) would be to present your info and images in a more book like way. That always seems more interactive to me than just a scroll. That being said i did really like clicking through your selfies.
I have to admit, I’ve always been one to look down on selfies and cast them aside as somewhat vapid forms of self-validation, seeking the approval of others through filtering and editing what is otherwise supposed to be a very natural, candid, untouched snapshot of yourself. But your comments on validation really changed my perspective. Yes, selfies may be a form of validation, but then again, is that so bad? Can it actually be an empowering gesture? It feels good to post things and send ourself out to the world, and there are much worse ways to seek validation than accepting yourself as who you are, taking pride in that image, and sending it out to others. Your essay truly made me realize that concept, and gave true worth to an action I had dismissed as vein and dishonest.
Your essay really began to pick up steam and impress me when you began the section on the selfie as a visual diary, a concept I had been introduced to in your draft but hadn’t fully bought into yet. But your line, “it’s not that they tell the truest, purest, most distilled story of Self, but rather that they chronicle the self’s journey of telling that story” sold me on your point immediately. They capture the journey of the self better than almost any other medium, and I would argue that their impurities, cover-ups, and filters don’t detract from that “honesty” but actually somewhat express your true self even clearer, for they give you not only a depiction of who you are but also what you choose to emphasize, downplay, correct, edit, and filter about yourself. More raw than Instagram but more edited than reality, selfies form a perfect intersection between the “you” that you actually are and the “you” you want to be, without tipping the scale in any direction too much. The range of selfies too – from raw, unedited, and even accidental to edited, filtered, and curated – gives a massive insight into the self and ones intentions, desires, vulnerability, and openness. Theres just something so empowering about sending out an unprocessed selfie, but there’s also something so revealing about the editing that you choose to make in a supposedly candid medium. But there’s also something so beautiful about keeping these honest little moments for yourself.
The strength of your incredible project came with your ability to constantly prove me wrong in exciting and bold new ways. When I saw the heading “Activism” in a project on selfies, I will admit that I in no way thought this section would possibly be a success. But through a brilliantly interwoven paragraph of case studies, news reports, examples, and powerful personal synthesis and poignant yet concise summations (ex: “All selfies have some degree of radicalism—constructing your own narrative is always about enacting control—but due to the history of oppression in this country, my selfies don’t mean as much, politically or socially, as selfies by people less privileged than me.”), I found myself agreeing with every word you said and actually wanting to get involved to brainstorm other projects like the #blackoutday that you explained. And I can safely say very few projects have brought me to that level of commitment and thought before.
The one concern I had was the jumble of selfies you seemed to be referring to in the above sections – ones we keep, ones we send out, one’s we filter, ones we take to document, ones we take to impress, etc… I couldn’t keep track of which selfies were being theorized on in what section, and how these could be ordered and explained as one unit instead of separate categories. But your case study at the end cleared all of this up, and very successfully summarized and explained all the different forms (including ones I hadn’t even thought about). My one comment would be to possibly include this section earlier or at least a summary at the beginning, so that I could have a clearer time reading through the theory at the beginning, already knowing the categories and distinctions. But overall, such an incredible job was done here.
Finally, your conclusion was so powerful and so thought-provoking (“I think the instinct behind selfies is just that we want to be noticed—not forever, not even for a long time, but just for a moment, a glimpse from our psyche to someone else’s. We want to be seen.”) that I almost want you to extend it further in the future. I would love for you to begin a public project in the future involving contributions of selfies from others on a larger scale, in an empowering yet fleeting manner where the images can be noticed but will disappear. This will allow for more honesty and candidness – a sort of artistic, activist Snapchat for empowering a public – while promoting positive views of the self and a movement towards honesty in our depictions of that self.
Hey Emily,
I think want to push back on the idea that “In a social media climate filled with overly anxious, insecure millennials, this active validation of self is something the world needs.” I’m not sure I understood your argument for why the world needs this as a validation of self for insecure millennials. I think have a few sources that underscored the issue of self validation for millennials would have made this much stronger.
I also think the scrolling worked in some ways it also prevented me from spending as much time as I wanted on the selfies themselves. I think Sam made a good point about a book or maybe a website hosting.
I think you did a really good job of exploring the complexities and different versions of selfies and exposing a whole “deep” (hate that word but no other way to say it) subculture to the vapid narcissistic culture many perceive selfies to have.
You did an excellent job of discussing the male gaze and the patriarchal brainwash that can lead to the idea that selfies are worthless because heaven forbid a woman thinks she looks good and want to take a picture of herself.
I appreciate that you had gone into the ‘realness’ or ‘authentic’ hierarchy of selfies. You start to go into it but I was like woah! so many hierarchies of power. A selfie that’s taken for #blackoutday has been legitimized by the activist and the sheer number of selfies. Where as a selfies that has been posted on instagram that has a ton of filters and make and everything else doesn’t seem as “authentic” (and I understand that is a highly loaded word with many problems). I think I just like this topic so I just wanted more.
I also think that your focus was really on snapchat selfies and I view that as a very different selfie experience compared to the Instagram or the Vine or the Facebook selfie and I think some acknowledgement of scope of your selfies would have led me to the creative component without wondering about instagram and others.
All in all really great work Emily!
Wow! This was such a cool project. I love that you coupled images with texts throughout the piece and used lots of examples. The initial artist was also really interesting. Lastly, the way you approached this topic was really innovative and brought substance to a concept typically characterized as insubstantial.
I learned about the multiple dimensions of selfies. It was so cool to learn about the selfie as a political tool, its role in mental health as well as in feminism.
The only thing I would consider is potentially a way to click between sections and break up the long scroll. I honestly didn’t mind the current format, another idea may be to keep readers engaged by having to click to the next section?
I’m going to admit that I was plagued by doubts about this project, due to my own assumptions about the self-indulgent, superficial nature of selfie culture. A self-study of selfies seemed to me like the academic equivalent of Alison Bechdel’s sequel to Fun Home, Are You My Mother? Though I love Fun Home, my reaction to her second book was: self-consciousness about narcissism doesn’t alleviate it.
But you have won me over with this intelligent, thoughtful, well-researched study that uses your own personal voice to explore the culture of selfies, without apologizing for your own immersion in it. It is precisely the zippy, informal style, combined with the probing intelligence, that makes this self-project so irresistible and fascinating.
Admittedly, I am who I am (*rhetorical selfie moment*), so I can’t suppress my critical faculties. I was pleased when you brought in Berger so deftly, but then frustrated when you didn’t address the fact that he argues that women not only serve as objects of the male gaze, but also view themselves as seen by men. If that’s the case, how are selfies a reclamation of the gaze? Aren’t they simply rendering more visible the female conditioning to see ourselves as objects of others’ gaze? Like Annie, I was also skeptical of the early claim that, “In a social media climate filled with overly anxious, insecure millennials, this active validation of self is something the world needs.” I’m not sure the world needs this validation of self, but maybe young American millennials do. But I am sure that academic scholarship needs more voices like yours: people who can take the conventions of scholarship (setting up a clear critical argument, incorporating other voices and perspectives, providing definitions and taxonomies, finding and analyzing evidence, weighing findings to address the “so what?” factor) and give them a lively, personal stamp, putting us in the presence of a living, breathing, intelligent person who cares about her topic.
Although you admitted frustration with the topic of authenticity, I think it is in this area where you may have made your most significant theoretical insights. I mentally gasped when I read, “Signs of construction, like a visible upper arm indicating the phone being held, make the selfie less fake.” This is SO interesting—authenticity today comes not from artlessness but from public acknowledging constructedness! (Maybe this explains why people call Trump authentic—he’s a brand, but he admits it and makes it so obvious.) I think you can take this argument a step further and show how crafting selfies thus becomes a way to forge an authentic self for a generation of young people who aren’t sure who they are.
Unlike some of your peer readers, I really enjoyed the Atavist format. I’d love to see you incorporate the slider though, and allow me to click through more. There’s more work to be done, in form and theory, on how audience’s interact in the construction of selfie. This could be an honors project: you are a feminist theorist and cultural critic in the making.